This text was read by OCR from a scanned newsletter and has not been proofread yet, so expect odd characters and mistakes.
he day dawned clear and bright - this couldn’t be right, it was Friday and I was going tramping AND that Raingod, Struan, was coming too. The day continued to be fine, still much to my surprise, and by the time 6:45pm had come, a light southerly was blowing but it still looked good.
We headed off from the Railway Station on the dot of 7pm! Fortunately Pete was driving, as Dave had left his boot inner soles at home. The drive up was pretty uneventful, although we did remember to pick up one of those mad Fit trampers at Plimmerton.
We arrived at the roadend while it was still light and those mad Fit people went tramping off into the night- we stayed put! After setting up camp, Pete arrived with Dave, boots and all. We decided to explore the vast metropolis of Levin - we came back after 10 minutes as nothing was happening. Before finally climbing into our sleeping bags, Struan gave us a weekend forecast - RAIN!
Saturday dawned even clearer and brighter
By Jane Loughnan than yesterday, if that was at all possible. Andrew got us all up and moving early, although some of us hadn’t got much sleep with a certain Scotsman snoring loudly through the night. We walked down to the Forest Park entrance - Raingod refused to go first as he didn’t want to soil his boots with Tararua mud - little did he know what was in store! We followed the track until we got to the river. This was a huge relief for Andrew who was feeling a bit dizzy from being away from water for a couple of hours. We splashed, jumped, tripped, fell, swam and tramped our way up the river. I was very pleased it was a beautiful day as I narrowly averted numerous face ploughs into the water.
As we were nearing exhaustion - --lunchtime; actually --we-came-across a-very interesting sight. Two hunters had caught (2) a deer and were slaughtering it in the water. I am a vegetarian and will say no more. . We had a delightful lunch in the sun by the river, then a not-so-delightful walk afterwards. We went straight up, and up, and up. And when we thought we had WI&MC May1996 reached the top, we went up again. When we finally got to the top, just on the bushline, the view was just fantastic and the climb was worth it. We could see all of the Manawatu and down to the sea. We had finally arrived at Te Matawai and were all pretty tired.
We set up camp on the chopper pad above the hut then proceeded to have the most wonderful dinner of rice with tuna and white sauce and loads of vegetables. This meant us pseudo-veges could eat it too. Desert was sickeningly sweet with too much cream, but we all still ate it. To cap it all off, there was a brilliant sunset.
Next morning and still no rain, although there was snoring but the culprit was unidentified. Raingod said that the weather would close in and it would rain. We set off again along the ridge with quite a few ups and downs and loads of muddy spots. Raingod finally got his wish on Twin Peaks when the mist closed in around us, but it didn’t last long. We followed the trail down to Waiopehu Hut where we had a welcome cup of tea and rejuvenated ourselves for the final run home. Raingod thought this was boring walking, but it was beautiful in the bush.
We had nearly made it out when Andrew’s worst nightmare came true - Lawrence (a newly-arrived Pom) sprained his ankle. Fortunately Liz, his partner (also a newlyarrived Pom) is also a doctor so we didn’t need to panic. We redistributed his load and we all made it back to the roadend safely. I even went for a swim when we got back! Coming back in the van was boring until I saw a 4WD roll over on the wrong side of the road! A great way to end the tramp thinking I was glad it wasn’t us.
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