Party: Jason, Jeremy, David, Nora, and a name I forgot (sorry)

One seemingly innocent weekend in the first university break of the year I was supposed to be leading a weekend trip into the Rimutakas. However with many people away on bigger, more exciting adventures during the break there wasn’t much interest. So plans changed and I organised a day trip into the East Harbour Park. Having not been out for a while I was determined that this would be as authentic a trip as possible and so had planned a good day involving some hill climbs, track walking, bush bashing, river bashing and good views.

The objective was Gollans Stream. It sounds cool, it looked cool, it was cool! Eager to not spend any time faffing around in the morning I stressed that we would be leaving Hunter at 8am. I was still quite surprised when I arrived at 7:55am to see that I was the last to arrive! Congratulations to this group for being the most organised and ready to leave I have ever experienced in VUWTC!

After some difficulty finding the start of track leaving up the hill Jeremy and I set off at a mad mans pace racing up the hill. At one point we did ponder how much good this would be doing to our bodies and general well being given that we were still both quite sick at the time. However such nonsense thoughts were soon replaced with a far more beneficial discussion about motorbikes and engines – Why does Jeremy have five motor bikes? Why he needs even more? And just how much more it costs to run his street machine than it does my car!

Fortunately when it came time to drop of the side of the track and down a spur into Gollans Stream I located an unmarked trail which we could follow. Unfortunately when the trail petered out I forgot I was suppose to be subtracting 23 degrees from my map bearing and added 23 instead…So I lead us on a bit of a merry dance through the bush, sliding down the steep bits, scrambling over rocks and down into a small side stream which we then followed down to Gollans. As you know I love doing that sort of thing but a few of the others looked a little uncertain by the time we reached the bottom.

To my absolute disgust Jeremy promptly located a track running beside the stream which meant there was the option of not getting wet feet. I wasn’t having a bar of it and set about instructing the others on good stream bashing technique. This seemed to interest them for a while until someone piped up asking if there was a track they could follow instead… (Seems only Jeremy and I knew we were all sitting on one!!!)

And so off we set, most on the track; Nora and I bashing happily down the stream. I was having an absolute blast and to my surprise so was Nora. This went on for a while – Nora and I running down the stream, slipping on rocks, wading through thigh deep pools, the others wandering along side along this “track” thing.

I remember distinctly one point where the stream and track crossed. I was bashing away, soaked from the waist down, kicking up big splashes of water, when Jeremy called out “Damn, I just got a wet toe”…And then a bit further on when I managed to slip of a bigger rock and get my foot stuck. Down I went landing on the sharp edge of a rock and giving myself the biggest bruise I have had in many, many years.

I spent some time lying in the sun much further down waiting for the others where we were to join that track that would take us back over the hill and back to civilisation. We sped along the track quite quickly, spent some time taking in the view from the hill top and then descended just as rapidly down in the suburbs below. Jeremy and I decided that walking back to the car along the beach was the best option so that’s what we did. This may have been influenced by the presence of an ice-cream store in the general direction of the beach…

Another excellent adventure led by Jason!!! See they don’t always rain and fail.