Well, I could be getting old (I mean, I am, every day, though it being my birthday recently it’s ever so slightly more in the front of my mind)…. but… headed off for the weekend to kowhai hut. It’s a tramp I’ve done a few times now, I do enjoy it.. but damn it was hard work!

It’s a 4ish hour walk (slightly more than last time… maybe the heat.. maybe.. too much excess and largesse in my life!) to the summit – which affords nice views of Kaikoura.

It’s also a nice place to Skype your partner? in GERMANY.

This world is ridiculous. I remember growing up with a ZX Spectrum 48K… now you can call someone for free from the top of a mountain on the other side of the planet. Ridiculous.

Anyway, pretty hot work getting to the top. I really don’t fair well in hot weather… and even though I was drinking quite a bit of water I was slightly headachy. I write this in here as I suspect I generally only write that it was a great tramp… and in fairness it was good to be out stretching the legs, but it’s not all roses.

There are a few scree slopes to descend before you get to the saddle. It’s not the nicest scree in the world.. but you do get to descend quite a bit quite quickly, and I’d rather descend it than climb it.

Now, the section of “track” (unmarked mostly) from the saddle down to the hut is supposed to take 2 hours… but it took us three… and we’re not that slow. The route had really deteriorated since last we were there.. we missed the odd shortcut simply because things were overgrown. It’d certainly not be a tramp to do unless you were relatively fit, and a reasonable navigator.

Still, the Spaniard grass was in flower, the river clean and cool, and some funky spiders (which narrowly avoided being squished due to Maaike’s sharp eyes).. It was so nice to eventually reach the hut after 11 hours of walking (give or take).. we had the place to ourselves which was nice.

So, a great sleep (extremely well deserved) and then a shortish walk out the next day. The track down was quite well marked which made a welcome relief from the day before. Again, lost the optimum route a few times, which in one place made for a slightly more dodgy traverse than would have been wished for… but all in all… a good tramp.

Next time I think we’ll do something a tiny bit easier.

Warning, slightly geeky post

The more observant of you may have noticed that they layout has changed slightly on the olde blogge. I had a little bit of time over Christmas and one of the things I’ve been meaning to do is to make the site ‘responsive’.

The idea for responsive design is that the site should degrade nicely as the screen size gets smaller. If you look at it on a mobile, or tablet, or a big screen it should look slightly different. You can see this easily by simply resizing your browser window.

I self host my blog on site5 which I must say I have been very happy with. The blog itself is built on wordpress and the theme I used as a starter for this is roots.io which itself uses the awesome bootstrap css framework. I cannot recommend more highly using a framework like bootstrap or Zurb Foundation if you are going to make any sort of website…. they really make the layout so so SO much easier to do.

Someday maybe I’ll be ‘cool’ and move to a statically generated blog (so there’s no database, everything is just created into static pages… fast to serve and bombproof). The only thing is, then the comments are held in disqus which I simply hate as a service… and I like the idea of having _all_ the content rather than most of it under my control and part of it (the interesting bits, the comments, do love comments.. comments comments comments ;) hehe, held by some 3rd party.. never a good idea).

Anyway, that’s about it for the update.. but for anyone wanting to play with laying out a website.. I highly recommend the above.

There was a small gap in the weather during which Maaike and I skipped off to Mount Owen (topomap).  It’s an interesting place Mount Owen.  Not unlike the burren in the west coast of Ireland – a karst landscape (i.e. limestone exposed to the elements).

We weren’t quite sure what the weather was going to do… but just hoped that the predicted one day of sunshine (or at least, not rain) would fall on the day we wanted to get to the summit.

There is simply heaps of really interesting vegetation on the way up, and it changes constantly as you head up the hill.

The final approach to the hut (where it was just the two of us on the 30th) was up a river… I do enjoy a good scramble up a river :)

The next day we left early ish so that we could hopefully make the most of the weather. It wasn’t looking that promising really to begin with (which was extremely disappointing!) fortunately it cleared pretty quickly. There is a trackish to the summit, but for a lot of the way you’re just following cairns. Mount Owen is not a place to go to in fog.. there are holes everywhere and people die / get into real issues fairly regularly..

We saw these two having a fight (as it turned out – I do love naturewatch.org.nz) on the way up… Also just awesome limestone for scrambling about on. It’s not a simple tramp.. but it is a good one.

The view from the top was spectacular.. really lucky that we had the weather window. We met a couple of German tourists heading up on our way down… when they finally got to the top (after a decent days walking as they’d started at the carpark that morning).. they were rewarded with thick cloud.

We had a lovely evening playing 500 with a couple from Nelson we met in the hut. They were (most) kind and shared their bottle with us to celebrate the new year.

On the way out again the ‘river’ that we’d walked up was now dry (though it was raining). It’s a crazy old place NZ.

Off up to Palmerston North to see family for Christmas. It really is so lovely having family in New Zealand! We had a lovely flight up with good views out over the sounds (Maaike’s turn for the window seat next time ;)

Unfortunately that was pretty much where the good weather stopped until.. well… into the new year pretty much. We still managed to sneak in a few walks – and even a trip to the beach which cousin Thomas pretty much insisted on (as he lives in London, slightly further from beaches)

The indecent weather did mean there was lots of opportunity to play my latest favourite game ;) … The Settlers of Catan. It’s an extremely addictive and nicely balanced game (well, perhaps 5% more luck than I’d like, though obviously only when someone else is winning ;)

My Aunt Mary took Maaike and I to see one of the local highlights – this incredible house light up for Christmas. It must really annoy the neighbours as there were lots of cars there late at night (and more arriving as we left). Still.. definitely festive!

I totally forgot to take pictures of Hannah Al, Miriam, James and Brigit… my bad.. but there were all well – growing up fast.

So yes, a lovely trip, really great to see Thomas back in New Zealand again – definitely looking forward to the next time already :)