Tramping redux
VulcanSpirit
Richard & Alison Brunstrom
Sun 15 Dec 2013 03:10
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Hurrah! Computer problems overcome (well,
circumvented) - Blog with pictures now back on line; there is a lot of catching
up to do!
We are just back from walking (= tramping in
kiwispeak) the Abel Tasman coast track for a few days. This is one of NZ's
'Great Walks', which are heavily promoted as tourist traps, and as a result it
is a very easy and popular walk. One can camp or hut; as usual the campers are
all tourists while the soft kiwis use the huts. The track runs along about 60km
of national park coast through virgin and recovering (from farming) bush, and is
very beautiful. Here is a typical view:
 The rock is a very friable granite which results in
beautiful white and orange sands and steep hillsides highly prone to landslips.
Here is Alison, fully loaded up for walking with
her brand new rucsac, on a typical empty beach:
 It turns out that she walks faster with a rucsac
than without, to general surprise.
The last night (we were out for four) was spent at
Whariwharangi (pronounced farri-farrangy; incidentally it may be of interest to
know that 'wh' is pronounced as 'f' in standard Maori because the Chief who came
to the UK to help produce the first Maori dictionary in the mid-nineteenth
century had not only a very pronounced northern regional accent, but also a
lisp - neither was realised at the time). There is a campsite and also a
hut:
 The hut was originally a farmstead and is now a
historic building. Typically, the farm lasted only fifty or sixty years - the
soil was too poor, which I would have thought was self-evident even in the
1890s. Just long enough to clear fell everything and shoot all the birds. But
now it's back to nature, surrounded by regenerating bush and a few birds. A pale
shadow of what was here, but extensive trapping and poisoning is keeping stoat
and rat numbers under control and active reintroduction programmes from captive
breeding are under way for some of the surviving native birds. But in the
meantime the woods are often compltely, eerily, silent.
And here are the happy trampers at the end of the
treck:
 This was supposed to be a shot of the rather nice
Maori-style track entrance but the Norwegian photographer has sadly cut some of
it out. This picture of the male half of the crew of Vulcan Spirit is rather
flattering - other contemporary photos show clearly that a smaller food intake
is necessary if he is not to join the ranks of the obese.
Amazingly Alison, having sworn off backpacking for
forty years, declared that it was a crying shame that we weren't carrying
straight on to do the 80km Heaphy Track. Reminiscent of a friends wife who
claimed for forty years that she couldn't go sailing, until she actually tried
it (if you're reading this, you know who you are).
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