Taranaki

Day 1. Thursday Night.

We left Wellington about 7pm and headed north towards Taranaki. We stopped at a mall somewhere along the way. Sam was accosted outside Pak ‘n’ Save by an 8 year old wanting to trade hard liquor for his sister. Sam agreed, but piked on the deal, leaving us with a bottle of whiskey we didn’t really want, and a screaming 6-year-old girl in the back of my Corolla. Sam didn’t know quite what to do with her, and, having tried to sell her on cheaply to several pedestrians, gave her the whiskey and let her out on the side of the road.

We arrived in Patea around 12:30am in the driving rain and debated whether to put up the fly or all sleep in my car. It took the four of us 15 minutes to put up the fly. When it was finished I felt a strong feeling of comradeship and success. So much so that I considered sleeping under the successfully erected fly with my new tramping buddies. The rain was coming down in sheets. It was 1am in Patea, home of Poi-eh, on a patch of grass beside the local boating club. I slept curled up like a stale twisty on the back seat of my car, waking once when a particularly foul gust of wind and rain hit the window. I felt guilty, and rearranged my pillow.

Day 2.

The next morning we left Patea and headed deeper into Taranaki. Dan became alarmed at a sign on the side of the road that reported that the facial eczema levels in Taranaki were currently low. He became upset because he realized that things could only get worse in the course of our trip, and was inconsolable until Conner remarked that we were all equally screwed, and that in Costa Rica facial eczema levels were currently at an all-time high. We arrived at the Dawson falls road end at around 11 and set off in the rain for Lake Dive hut. The only interesting thing on the 2 and a half hour stretch was the spectacular effort that the National Park rangers had gone to in building wooden steps. The steps had not been confined to sloping areas, and in some cases led off on false trails ending at precipices, or around in circles. When the mists lifted we got a view of the lower slopes of the mountain. We arrived at Lake Dive hut at around 2:30 and spent the rest of the afternoon playing cards and assimilating chocolate biscuits.

Day 3.

We woke up before sunrise to the sound of rain on the roof and elderly hikers rustling and talking loudly in the bunk below us. They were the same elderly hikers that had indulged in a disgraceful ‘massage chain’ the previous evening, with accompanying cries of “Lower! Lower!” and “His wife is at home, you can go lower!” It was awful. I covered my head with my sleeping bag so I couldn’t hear them anymore.

We left the hut at around 8:30am, through drizzle coming in at an improbable 75 degrees. We had decided to turn back from our planned route to Waiaua gorge, a 7-8 hour slog that crossed several rivers. Heavy rain had been forecast for Sunday. Instead we walked back to the car park at Dawson falls and had a coffee. When we arrived at the carpark the clouds over the mountain parted for the first time and we caught a glimpse of the summit. We took a photo from the safety of the visitor’s center, and had another coffee. Dan and Connor, deciding that we had not done enough that day to justify eating tea, made a side trip on the upper trail back to Lake Dive hut, and stamped around in the snow. Guy, myself and the other party, disagreeing, walked the hour to Wainangoroa Hut, and lay like smashed sardines outside in the sun. We ate chocolate, drank beer (cheers Sam), talked small things and watched the sun arc across the sky and clouds float over the summit of Mt. Taranaki. We felt good.

Day 4.

Got up, ate power stars, started walking. We were heading around the mountain to another hut starting with the letter ‘W’, and so spent most of the day walking down into, and up out of, a succession of river valleys. As we stood at the ridge above a valley we could turn our eyes up and follow its shape and the path of its river through stunted beech, to alpine shrubs, to tussock and on up into mist. If we turned our eyes down we saw them pass through taller trees, and on down to the partitioned fields that lay all around the mountain.

We got to the hut to discover no wood fire, but a gas heater with no gas. I do not know this for sure, but someone suggested to me that this may have been the work of OSH, who do this sort of thing on purpose. Perhaps the threat of mechanically incompetent trampers blowing themselves up was more serious than that of cold trampers freezing to death. Be that as it may, OSH are still bastards. We were cold, you idiots.

Day 5.

Got up, ate sardines and prunes, and walked up a big damn hill from the hut to a lodge above the snowline. 500 meters up a 4WD track. From the lodge we walked at a gentle downward angle past a skifield and a nearby valley that at some time in its history when it was very soft had been set upon by a giant with a big plastic yogurt spoon. We wound up at the Dawson’s Falls road end again, and ate scones and coffee and cream and jam. (You hear me you bastards? SCONES!! I said scones! Not biscuits! They were squishy and sconny! No, a biscuit is NOT a cookie! Bastards!). Then we drove home singing along to the Taranaki ‘golden oldies’ station and we are now all friends and I’m tired of writing and I’m drifting off to sleep.