This text was read by OCR from a scanned newsletter and has not been proofread yet, so expect odd characters and mistakes.
NARROW NECK —- PAVUA’ SAH RAPHAEL
Railway station, Friday night - who were these people, why were they standing there? What were they wearing? Suddenly they were gone, speeding into the night; their mission to go where no man had gone before. Almost as quickly as it had begun it was aver. With great agility they surged forth in search of Fun, Adventure, Sleep! Many, many hours later a campsite was selected, chosen for its inadequacy and inability to hold our small yet bold group comfortably - it was perfect.
After only a little sleep they were gone, moving under the cover of darkness to avoid skin cancer.As the valley narrowed difficulty was had in finding the most hideous and miserable route to the pass. The gang of seven exploded onto the saddle, stopping only briefly to prevent biackout before racing down inta the upper Grongorongo valley. This was no longer a WI & MC tramp. Mo, this was a Race against Time. To speed up our journey time downstream, our team leader (Anita) developed a technique similar to forward roiling. This was preferred as it was by far the most painful. Lunch was eaten without stopping.
The evening meal was the usual combination of mud, hair, vegetation, decaying meat and cardboard giving it that authentic tramping taste. The campsite was lacking two things, electricity and running water. But we were tough, we could hack it!
it rained hard overnight, making the river treacherous. Instead of taking the obvious route we decided to bush-bash, cunningly finding the thickest supplejack groves so that progress became blissfully miserable. But all toc soon it was over and we were ambling down the wide river bed, occassionally tripping and falling to keep up the enthusiasm.
Back at the Catchpole roadend we slowly prepared ourselves to face the dangerous and often difficult week ahead. Stumbling along the track behind me (Sam) were: Anita Catchpole, Hugh Stevens, Alasdair Wallace, Paul Hughes, Jonny Waghorn and Bill Bristow.