8 - 12 November 2007

From the Psychotic to the Sublime

The Lake Waikaremoana Track

Day 1, Page 6

I have an ongoing distrust when it comes to walking on rocks. They are seldom level or predictable. Wet boots and wet rocks together are a recipe for caution. If it involves some scrambling as well I feel distinctly vulnerable.

Miranda pauses to see how I'm doing. OK.

The landscape is now an almost uniform green.

We continue, sometimes striding out, mostly picking our way.

How would you like to be called, in effect, the "stinking death breath". Coprosma foetidissima is the plant that gave the genus its name and, yes, if you rub the leaves the result is not pleasant. I rarely encounter it around Auckland, but up higher it seems to be in its element.

Boggy patches are becoming much more frequent, not deep at all, but I notice that the leak in my right boot is back again, and I make the effort where possible to stay dry.

The scruffy grey grass is becoming pretty much the dominant surface cover along here.

We push on.

We pass another of the cliff-edge passages and I manoeuvre past before pointing the camera at the view. Some days down the track (?) I am enjoying these views much more than I did at the time.

More boggy patches.

I think this is the spot with the 3m rocky scramble just around the corner to the left. There's no way I can get me and the pack up that slope, and I pass the pack up to Miranda. I am beginning to feel somewhat distressed. I am extremely uncomfortable in territory where I cannot depend on my own skills to get me through. Even with my pack off I am terrified as I look for hand and footholds, all worn smooth, with a very large drop right behind if I slip.

I have it in my head that the bit just before the Panekiri hut is another doozy and once past here, there's no way I want to come back down this piece of slope. I have given myself a fright and I am not psychologically in good shape just here.

Grey grass and lichen and clammy damp and great vertical drops. How the hell did I get myself into this?

We head downhill fairly sharply.

There's a split level track here, and the lower level is a bit narrow for the elderly and stout.

We head on down. Damn! We're going to have to climb again to make up this height.

Another patch of cliff-edge path, about 400mm wide at it's narrowest, and I examine the cliff beside me for handholds. I don't need them to carry my weight, just to secure my balance which is not good out near the edge. I squeeze past carefully.

A weathered beech that tells its own story of the winds that must batter this section of the track regularly. Not today, thank heavens.

There's a weird kind of interplay between the part of me that is terrified and the bit that is carefully documenting the trip for later on.

There's also a difference between the sense I had on the Heaphy of meeting and resolving height challenges from my own emerging capabilities, and feeling stronger from that, and the sense that I am not in command on this track and that I am depending in a sense on luck and the abilities of others.

We're descending again.