Walkabout

If this is starting to seem like a long day, it's because it was seeming like that to us as well. We carried on along the track...

and the landscape continued to change and it was still beautiful but we're starting to feel the accumulation of today's and yesterday's efforts.

This lump of quartz embedded in the mossy bank is typical of what's there for you if you keep your eyes open long enough.

Just about all we've heard all day is our own voices and the sound of wind and running water. Suddenly there's a very foreign sounding noise. It's a chopper.

Ah! What's that. No. Not Saxon. Saxon has a red roof. I've seen a picture of it.

Miranda has been thoroughly enjoying the mineral stained pieces of quartz along the way. If we can't carry it out, we'll get a picture of it anyway.

For large parts of the track the surface underfoot is a coarse quartz sand of a golden brown colour that would fetch a mint if you could miraculously transport it to an Auckland Garden Centre.

We dump our packs. There are a couple of DOC fieldworkers waiting for the chopper to come back and collect them at the end of a day's work.

The first run we heard earlier was to replenish the gas bottles. We have caught another glimpse behind the scenes.

There are also a couple of sleepingbags and a pack in one of the sleeping bays, and no-one around that we can see.

We unpack, make a cuppa and and begin "cooking" dinner. I wind up real lucky here, as Miranda supervises the reconstitution and heating of dinner, and Carol insists on washing up. My reward for pre-trip preparation. I appreciate it more and more.

I have a closer look at the written material in the hut. I haven't read anything except my diary for a couple of days. I even read the instructions on the gas cooker. Someone could do with a spelling lesson.

I do some bodywork on Carol's leg and shoulder and on Trish's sore hip. Keiko arrives, a Japanese nurse, working on the West Coast. She has walked in from Heaphy, about 35km. Well, that's that as far as moaning goes. Around about dark we are starting to get anxious about the absent sleeping bag occupants, when they arrive. They've spent the last night here, and walked over to Lewis and back with minipacks today. Shit.

The lass of the two is a Rolfer and we chew the fat for a bit about bodywork. She tells me there is a woman with injured heels at Mackay Hut, unable to walk more than a step or two.

I pick up a set of track notes printed off from some website or other and left behind. It goes into some detail about wobbly and very high super-suspension bridges over the "very deep, very brown" Gunner River and the Murray, and I start going downhill in a huge way.

I hadn't realised how much the suspension bridges earlier today had got to me. These ones just weren't going to be fordable - by me at any rate. The biggest catch was that if I got to the first one on Day 5 and couldn't make it across, I'd have four days walk back to Browns Hut and be 400 km from the Karamea end of the track, and all this, gulp, on half-rations.

I'm not too keen on the way those clouds are gathering overhead. Miranda orders up some better looking weather for tomorrow.

We spend an hour or two on crossword puzzles from Miranda's book - something of a community effort - and then hit the sack.

I might have got an hour's sleep overnight but for the most part I am an insomniac wreck. I can't stop thinking about those bloody suspension bridges.