This text was read by OCR from a scanned newsletter and has not been proofread yet, so expect odd characters and mistakes.
by Melissa Hewson Our journey began at the ferry terminal there were 12 of us in total, John, Suzanne, Renee, Christian, Coustanza, Anita, Sam, Michael, Nola, Frank, Myself and of course our faithful leader Alisa. We headed on to ferry. In Picton we got in a van and began the first leg of our journey. We drove to Nelson lakes at St Arnaud and Alisa told us all to find a place to sleep and she got in the trailer and left us all wondering what we were all in for the next day.
Friday morning we woke to sunshine and piled back into the van and headed to Punakaiki where our tramp was going to begin, there we checked out the pancake rocks and blowholes before we had our lunch and began our tramp. Our route began at a kayak place by the Porarari river where we put on our packs and just about fell over from the weight. We walked through the bush beside the river and enjoyed the company of the many birds. We stopped every hour to regroup and have a snack and enjoy the view. We walked for about three and half hours this day and our intentions were to camp at Bullock creek, but when we got here we discovered that there was no where to camp, that was ok as up the track by the cave creek memorial there was a space that we had decided we would camp. We set up camp, and began to cook our tea of fish kedgeree, while we were eating tea we got on to the topic of sleeping in the bush and having weka and possums coming to visit us in the night and stealing stuff, Renee asked Nola and Michael if they had that problem in Australia they said it was more a case of koalas. Renee said aren't all the koala’s dying over there as they are all getting STD’s, Alisa piped up and said “do they have a lot of partners?” Renee replied “well that is usually how STD's are passed along!” (At this point the rest of the group was laughing so much that it was very hard for Renee to respond to Alisa). After tea dishes were done and we retired for the night at a reasonable hour of 7.30pm. Saturday morning we all woke just before 7am Anita and I got up and went to get some water for breakfast from Bullock creek, By the time we came back at eight everyone had gone back to sleep. But they got a rude awaking when we turned up with the water! Our intentions for the day were to climb Mt Bovis, We all looked at the map had a discussion and most of the group decided that we would just explore the area and camp at Dilemma Creek. At 10:30am we headed up to Cave Creek, here Christian managed to fall in the creek and end up in waist deep water, Frank turned round and said “did it feel good!?, we then came back to walk up Bullock creek and head through the bush to camp at Dilemma Creek. On our way we walked past a swimming hole and Alisa decided that we should stop and have a lunch here, some of us went for a swim, but for some we were not as willing! but as it happens we too ended up in the water anyway. After our swim we again looked at Mt Bovis and Sam got his binoculars out to assess the terrain, we then decided that we would carry on up the river after lunch of course. We tramped up the river and eventually came to more bush and tramped through this and again stopped every hour. When we got to the end of the track, and meet up with Fossil creek it was about 4:30pm. Alisa decided it would be best if we camped here for the night as we were really not sure what the area was like by Dilemma Creek and thought that it might be a bit like bullock creek. For tea Alisa cooked us up a couscous curry and we had chocolate biscuits for dessert,
Alisa tested out her massage skills on Sam who seemed to enjoy it all too much! After this everyone went to bed apart from John, Suzanne, Anita and I, as we decided that we would play a few games of 500 before we went to bed.
Sunday, We got up earlier and got on track a lot earlier, the plan was to walk up to the ballroom. We all managed to have breakfast together today and be packed up at the same time even if Renee did try and throw some of her gear into the river. We walked up to Dilemma Creek and discovered that we had made a wise decision about camping at Fossil Creek as the camp site was only big enough to sleep about two people. The day was full of crossing rivers to get to the Ballroom where we stopped to have lunch and set up camp. After lunch Coustanza, Alisa and I decided that we should have an Easter egg hunt since it was Easter Sunday, Coustanza and I went and hid 12 piles of Easter eggs by the river and then came back to inform everyone that Easter bunny had visited us while we were having lunch, as we were coming back to where everyone was we heard a lot of laughter and were wondering what an earth was happening, we came back to find them playing Frisbee, and much to our surprise Frank and Christian wearing long johns with nothing over them! Once we had stopped laughing they all went hunting for eggs and then we came back and feasted on them. We then walked up the river for a while to explore what was up there and feasted on jelly beans on the way, we also bumped into the fits who informed us what we could have seen if we went up Mt Bovis, they joined us that night at the ballroom. After our wander up the stream we came back and cooked a pasta tea with various sauces and veggies which made an interesting meal. After tea we Sat round and talked for a while and then most of us retired for the night while the rest of us stayed up and talked some more.
Monday morning we all woke to rain pouring down, we all then had our last breakfast and went on our travels back down the fox river to the sea side on the way we explored a side stream that we had been told was a magical wonderland and it really was, not that many of us went that far down as I happened to grab a stinging nettle on the main path and it put a lot of people off going any further, but going that little bit further let me see an eel just sitting in the water. After exploring this wonderland we headed down the river to stop off and explore the caves and eat our lunch and after lunch we headed to the end of track and were met by the Fits and a nice dry warm van to travel back to Picton, to take most of us back to work the next day.