Christmas...in the middle of Winter!!!

The first half term of study is drawing to a close and a whole two weeks of holiday looms after Friday. Have some exciting plans, but more about those after they have happened. A few weeks ago I went on my first trip to the Tararua Range with the tramping club. The theme of the weekend was ‘Midwinter Christmas’ - anything strange about that, well for Kiwis yes! Christmas for them usually consists of visiting a beach in the sun and having a barbecue in the long light evening. It is also possible to have a white christmas if you’re keen, on the summit of Mt Cook for example. The Tararuas are the first range of sizeable mountains to the north of Wellington, having said that, however they are largely a vast jungle of temperate rainforest. The bush line lies at 1000m+ the highest summit being ‘Mitre’ at 1571m. And unfortunately we didn’t manage to scale any significant summit despite climbing to the grand height 600m (but still being in thick undergrowth). The lack of summit ‘ticking’ on this trip might have something to do with the amount of supplies we had in our rucksacks. No luxury was spared for this christmas meal - even a pressure cooker was brought to the hut! There were probably about 40 on the trip and the aim was to walk down the Mangahao River track to the Hut of the same name, cook christmas food and do other christmassy things, like receiving presents from Santa and drinking mulled wine. The Sunday involved the reverse of the valley route, however not wanting to miss the opportunity to see a bit more of the Tararuas, Nicolai (Germany), Sam (Alska) and myself decided to walk further up-valley from the hut to get some views from a ...clearing... of the snow dusted summits. The trip of course involved some interesting river crossings (thigh deep), where the track had been taken out by a landslide. Some even decided to swim complete with pack through some deep sections of river on the walk out! Plenty of bush-whacking skills were practiced too, as some sections involved crawling through dense vines and ferns. At times it seriously felt like we were discovering unchartered regions of the Amazon basin.

The tent sees the first action - campsite next to the Mangahao Flats Hut, Tararua Range

Even Santa made it on 'Midwinter Christmas', in a trampers' rucksack!

Some members decided to 'swim out' down the valley! Photo by Kieran (at the time I was somewhere up-valley exploring the undergrowth, however this is a classic 'mad-tramper' shot, thanks Kieran for capturing the moment)

So that was ‘christmas’ - the last few weekends have been spent sampling the trad rock climbing on some of the sea cliffs out at Titahi Bay, which was most excellent if a bit loose in places. Have also used the spare sunny days to continue explorations of the Wellington region coastline. There was a plan to head to Mt Ruapehu for some Ice Climbing this last weekend, but a rather frisky storm that lasted from Friday through to Saturday night put a stopper on that - 110km/hr winds on North Island with torrential downpours. Surely would have made the climbing somewhat epic. It felt like our little shack of a hall of residence was going to succumb to the elements on Saturday - but in true NZ spirit, it fought on through.

Breaker Bay on the Miramar Peninsula, the narrow expanse of water is the entrance to Wellington Harbour. According to Maori legend the peninsula is body of a beast that used to live in Wellington Harbour!

Hopefully the weather will be slightly more forgiving for the coming weekend where the plan is to dig a 20 man snowcave on the summit plateau of Mt Ruapehu, have a barbecue on Saturday night (on snow) and then play cricket against the Auckland University Tramping Club on Sunday. Whatever will these mad trampers have me doing next? All is good fun though!