8-12 November 2007

From the Psychotic to the Sublime

The Lake Waikaremoana Track

Day 4, Page 6: Marauiti to Waiharuru

Can't be far away. (Signal for drink of water, which I ignore at my peril.)

We've left the autobahn behind for the moment and are back with regular lakeside track.

and once again we start to climb to take us round a small headland.

The track is once again full of large rocky surfaces.

Aloing we go, with the lake just off to our side.

and gently down

Here we are

and here's the hut sign. Not that there's any mistaking the hut. DoC couldn't afford to have two like this one.

It's bloody monstrous. The far hut is cookhouse and dining room and the near hut is sleeping accommodation.

This is completely over the top, a corporatised tramping hut. Each individual cubicle is shaped from carefully smoothed and polyurethaned pine,

each with its private pack stowage, and the whole affair is in a completely separate building from the cookhouse and dining facilities. I'm surprised they haven't bitten the bullet and put solar power units all over the vast roof areas for hot showers.

But even here, the architects could have taken a leaf out of the old Whanganui Hut further along. The rail along the edge of the bunk is about 50mm higher than the mattress. Getting out of your bunk involves rolling over an unpleasant ridge. Yes, it keeps you in your bunk, but the smaller raised shoulder rails in the Whanganui hut do that just as well and the remainder of the rail is about 50mm lower than the mattress.

I hate to be townist, but the whole affair looks as if it were designed in Havelock North by magazine editors.

A necessary visit to the toilet springs another surprise: a toilet roll holder. Still no toilet paper, but it's the first inkling on the track that toilet rolls might feature somewhere in the design package.

Lesleigh and Dakin arrive in the boat with another trout or two and we head out for a tour around the lake.

Dinner is smoked trout, and the last of the Woodthorpe sav blanc plus a couple of half bottles of very decent red some departing fishermen have left us.

When I first arrived I found myself in conversation with a gentleman about my age with a fairly clipped accent. I've since been told it's East Coast station dialect. He wanted to know whether I'd got any sleep at Waiopaoa. I said, yes, of course I had. No trouble at all. And then I realised that he'd been referring to the hunters' party and the Slim Dusty songs.

"Hunters, well, possibly, I suppose...."

The tone was unmistakable, though to be sure, the gentleman in question had a very large deer wrapped in cloth and hanging nearby in a tree and a number of trout to his name. In fact he cast a mean fly, as we watched him later with some of the teenagers in their party. "Hunters. Not our kind I'm afraid, really...."

Our smoked trout dinner was delicious. Tramping is not usually like this at all.