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The Lewis HutWe stop for a sit and a look at the map. It's not as though we're in any doubt about the route, but consulting maps from time to time is part of the deal.
Must be getting close now
We have come a long way down from Mackay. It's about 1.30pm. A good day.
Lewis meets Heaphy. The elements that call to you in a piece of scenery are often hard to define. If somebody had brought me the occasional biscuit and the occasional cup of tea on the bench outside the Lewis Hut, I'd probably be sitting there still looking and listening and swatting sandflies. I just recall a tremendous sense of peace and resolution. It was a place to stop at. Two days early and journey's end.
Just down the river a touch is the Heaphy Bridge. Each of those uprights is about 2m apart, and the bridge disappears into the bush for a way on each side. As we watch, I see Hans and Rob heading across it one by one on their way to Heaphy Hut, but I don't have the camera. What I do notice is that it has very little movement compared to the Big River bridge. Both Hans and Rob are at least six feet tall and carrying a pack and the bridge hardly moves.
We head back up to the hut. Incidentally, that's not a tv aerial, it's a radio transmission mast for summoning help. Lewis is the only hut to have this facility available to trampers, though it may well have been located in the ranger's hut elsewhere on the track. Louise talked about a 7pm sched. Incidentally, a recent very heavy rain saw the Lewis up as far as the bottom of the hut steps.
With some interest I notice a koromiko growing on the riverbank. I have been suffering a mild diarrhoea, nothing humiliating, but eating the growing tips of this tree - about 3 or 4 of them - is a traditional Maori remedy that I have had occasion to use, and very successfully, in the past. I note also a few yards away a tutu bush in full ripe luscious-looking berry, and very poisonous. When I was a lad, one of the Wirth's Circus elephants was tied up outside the Pukekohe Railway Yards and grazing on a small tutu shrub growing nearby was enough to kill it. It might be worth a DOC warning in the huts.
The pale mottled leaf in the front is a ramarama (Lophomyrtus bullata), and a bit further along out of the picture is a tree nettle (Urtica ferox), of which more later.
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