Well, what a weekend, left on Saturday morning for the tramp, picked up from home, which was great :) It was a great tramp, have said I will write a trip report for it too for the tramping club. Apparently there’s a bar of chocolate in it for me! It was a wet trip. A very wet trip.

This was after about 2 mins into the trip, and it pretty much went like this for the next two days.

The first day definitely felt like the longest (though it wasn’t of course!) We were basically following a river crossing backwards and forwards for the first couple of hours.

But it felt like an age before we finally saw the hut we were to stay in poking out of the trees – hehehe, our leader – Sylvia – who is great – got quite the slagging after saying there was just 1km left until the hut (I doubt it was more than two – but the terrain was pretty awful so it took a while) So yeah, the hut

It really is such a great system, I got the hut pass a while ago – $60 or something, lasts for the year, the huts we stayed in would have been $10 a night… it’s great though, you get your own bed (so no need to carry a thermarest… though that’s not a bad idea!) they all have tabletops, the better huts have tables and heaters – the one we were in had a stove, which was lovely. Spent the evening playing cards, excellent. Oh, a nice brie and tux biscuits after a long days walking goes down very well!

–Sunday–

So up and away, this was the longer day – walking from 8am until 5pm, but it felt easier, the terrain was quite varied over the course of the day – part of it was close to a mountain called ‘broken mountain’. The site of some massive earthquake that pretty much split a mountain in half. You end up with a lot of scree

Then it was off up a pretty steep gully and to a tarn.

Off down to the second hut (still with wet feet for the day!) This one was pretty much the same as last night – except that all the wood was wet, and so we didn’t really have a fire.

–Monday–

Hiked out, it was nice to end on a pretty easy walk out – again really different terrain too

It was a great weekend though, thanks to Sylvia, Amber, Geoff, Thor, Jana and Fraser for a fun weekend. Hope to get away with them again sometime, I really do think the CUTC is going to work out. Really looking forward to the Mountain Skills course they run too!

Other than that, well moving out this week sometime, though I had forgotten that Maeve has the car for the week so not quite sure what to do about that one! Harumph, will see…

Firstly a silly pic of me on casual Friday in the contact centre

I mean come on, I should be in one of those bands where they just pretend to sing on stage…. headphone sets are cool ;)

So, the RA palindrome was supposedly Racecar, however, I never trusted that as being the longest one (besides in some dictionaries it’s hyphenated anyway) so.. here’s the text of a mail I sent round work (did get some funny replies ;)

Just for the record (never did trust that race-car or racecar palindrome!)

Malayalam.

Is a noun in the English language

Main Entry: Mal-a-ya-lam

Pronunciation: “ma-l&-‘y-l&m;, “m-

Function: noun

: the Dravidian language of Kerala, southwest India, closely related to

Tamil

(source www.m-w.com)

And I quote from the quiz..

“What seven letter word, beginning with the letters ‘RA’ is the longest single-word palindrome in the english language?’

Well, I mean, clearly the whole competition should be null and void seeing as Malayalam (that common every day word) is 9 letters long…

Just to nit-pick ;)

I’m sure there are longer single word palindromes out there.. but sure anyway.

I think I’m spending too much time on palindromes :) Hehehe, so work was grand this week, fun party last night – 1/2 of it was spent suspended from the beams over the deck trying to learn how to swap over ropes in mid air. Something I will be doing in 3 weeks time (with a 150m drop below me… more about that later!) This weekend will be tramping in Arthurs pass, sounds like a pretty – tough – route we’ll be doing, but all the more fun for that. No tracks.. which will be a first for over here. Following ridges etc. I think. Other than that, oh yes – well next week will be Paynes Ford, quite looking forward to that (sport climbing). And next week I move into the new house, so that’s going to be – different!!! hmmmm, hopefully in a good way.

A quick pic from the river crossing. If you’re wondering what I’m wearing it’s in order to ‘blend’ over here… Kiwis all wear ‘PolyPro’ and shorts. It’s a poor-mans thermal underwear.. But quite warm, retains heat when wet, and dries incredibly quickly.

But it does come in pretty weird colours :)

So what did I do this week.. hmmm, work was grand, phisio was fine too! – ACC have said they’ll cover it all (really is a great system!), so that’s all good. Had a table quiz in work on the friday night pretty tricksy questions… What’s the longest palindrome in the english language? Starts with RA. Answers on a postcard… ;)

Saturday – went on a river crossing course which was great fun, pretty much the same I think, as the one Glynn and Maeve went on a while ago – they just teach you how to cross a river (methods of linking up etc), things to look out for (i.e can you back out – is there space to get out the other side, is there a margin of safety – and also – is there badness a bit further down the river (e.g are you crossing upstream of a waterfall)). All things to consider :)

But great fun, and a really sound bunch of people too, really looking forward to getting into the college club a bit, they do mountaineering too, so lots to join in on.

Sunday – well a great start to the day when my brother Chris rang saying that ‘Oops, we accidently had transferred the tax-back you got into Dad’s account’. Harumph, see I put in for tax back when I left Ireland, and my friend Liam got 800 euro back or something, so I was expecting about the same, but never heard anything, so pretty much gave up on it. So, yeah, pretty much a bonus of 862 euro or something. Which is definitely nice.

So I went to the Katmandu sale… (patagonia / great outdoors chain of this part of the world). And bought myself some semi-rigid boots which should be well capable of taking crampons, well, actually they’re really quite rigid, but they’re not plastics… so I think they should be fine for the stuff I want to do, though will be asking around a bit – they have a returns policy here..

Then just went out climbing for a single pitch, have to get back training again, been too long out of it, though I guess I’ve just been keeping busy with squash, still, time to get back into it (now that the weather has turned bad ;) me smart.

Maeve turned a 1/4 of a century, had a really cracking dinner here for it – loadsa vino (Glynns sterling choice – he’s currently in OZ climbing with Domhnall) They had an amazing itinerary mapped out so I’m really looking forward to hearing about it.

Well, excellent weekend, and productive too :) Friday night was a bar-b-q and complete meat-fest. It was given by Maeve’s boss’ partner (Shane) out on his farm in the countryside.. it was a really excellent place. A lot of the furniture around the house had been made by Shane, and it was really impressive, beautiful native wood too. It was a fairly late night, though I headed for bed, before Glynn found his way to the (freezing) pool for a midnight (5am) swim…

It was great though, because two of Shanes’ friends had flats to let.. so I got their numbers and checked it out on Sunday… I think I would have preferred the first one, but seeing as I can’t move out of here until 9th April I was quite sure they’d find someone in the meantime… so have taken the second place – With Jim and his flatmate from the Coramandel Jim is a plumber, the other flatmate is a concrete cutter. I suspect the atmosphere will be relaxed ;) Quite looking forward to it. It’ll also be around about 1/2 the cycle in the morning, and that’s just going to be great! So yeah, ’tis all go here!