So I’ve always wanted to get to Mueller Hut. It’s a pretty old (well, the first one was built a long time ago – it’s now the 5th Mueller hut) alpine hut situated high above the valley floor with excellent views of Mt. Cook.

The weather was supposed to be pretty dodgy this weekend so initially it was called off – but Warrick had a second look and thought things looked good – so we headed off on Friday evening. Stopping for obligatory fish & chips in Geraldine. Cool chipper.. I even got to write on the walls.

Camped by the shores of Lake Tekapo on Friday night.. and enjoyed a nice bottle of white down by the shore. See tramping doesn’t have to be awful ;)

–Saturday–

Slightly cloudy start to the day – which was perfect really as it’s quite a steep hike up the hill – and you’d fry if the sun was out. Beautiful views out over towards cook and over the Hooker Glacier

Warrick found some time to go swimming in the Sealy Tarns (1300m).. and to admire the view..

Once we got to the hut – we left our bags there and continued up to Mt. Oliver which was Ed Hillarys first major climb. Mind you, we had steps quite a bit of the way and no snow whatsoever, so we may have had an easier time of it. Maybe.

I think one of the things I really love about NZ – and especially about getting out into the hills – is seeing the stars at night. I could be wrong (happens occasionally) but in the Southern Hemisphere we look *into* the plane of the Milky Way – whereas on the Northern Hemisphere (losers ;) you look *out* of it. So we get to see lots more stars and you don’t. So there. Yet another good reason to move down here.

Postcard for the first person to correctly identify the pointers, southern cross and where the south celestial pole is in the picture above)

So yes – thanks to Warrick & Hannah for a really great weekend.

So I’ve really enjoyed this years rogaine series with Steve & Michelle (guest starring, Anna, Amy, Thor and Mike) – really looking forward to next years now… but will definitely make a huge bright head torch first!!

Ummm… so thanks to all the people who sent me good wishes for coming back to Europe… but – it wasn’t exactly true.. It was April 1st.. I’m still quite happy here so no plans at the moment.

If you look carefully (nice one Marcel) at the last post some of the letters are italicised ;)

So, I think I’ve finally decided that it’s time to head back to Europe.. it’s a pretty tough decision after 4 1/2 years in the land of the long white cloud, but I think it’s the right one to make finally. I guess now that I have permanent residence that it doesn’t make toooooo much difference anyway.

So, Just to be geeky for a second… I’m not sure how many of you have discovered iGoogle… but basically it allows you to customise your Google homepage. On mine I just have a gmail plugin (so it shows me what’s in my inbox) and Google Reader. Google reader is quite a nice little RSS reader. What this means – is that you can subscribe to all your friends blogs and it will automagically tell you when they’re updated. Quite useful. You can click to test it out. It will ask you do you want to add it to Google Reader (good idea) or to the iGoogle homepage..

Well I like it anyway. So there.

As for the other thing… lets say every time you went to your mailbox (postal one!) you found that all of your mail had been slit open and read.. and then put back nicely… you’d be pretty annoyed I imagine? I would be anyway. Well that’s pretty much what happens with email – except that you can’t tell it’s been opened.

I rarely use encryption because
a) no one else uses it
b) it’s a pain to use.

Enter FireGPG a FireFox plugin for GPG – which basically makes it super simple to encrypt emails / attachments / anything else you like and send it around the place… brilliant. You will need to fist install WinPT and GPG if you’re on windows..

Once you’ve installed it all and generated your keys – then if you want to send me a test email you can download my public key