Monday, February 23: Rain overnight, overcast at first, clearing to fine with a few clouds and warm. Later very changeable

Tramping, 7.7 km

Oturere Hut (DOC, $32)

• GPS
• YouTube

Ngauruhoe promised to give a bit of a sunrise so I set up the A470 with infinite focus and it seemed to work OK. We were later for breakfast than the others who were headed directly to Whakapapa because their bus was to pick them up at 2:00.

Had some of the bread and salami for breakfast, with 2 double coffees with condensed milk for breakfast, then packed my stuff together and spent some time discussing this & that with Khalil, Nick & Slater, who were all headed in the same direction. Eventually we decided to move off.

The path today traverses a number of lava flows, albeit with different vegetations. The first couple were mountain beech and very full of epiphytes. I took a number of pictures of small berries in red and purple. We stopped briefly at a river, and then moved into the more recent volcanic/alpine communities. At this point I decided that I had reached my warm-up point and set off at my preferred pace, which was considerably faster than that of my companions. I made a point of photographing the landscapes, and still I was almost an hour ahead of the others.

GPS

Pretty soon the hut showed up, with one initial inhabitant. A larger group turned up for lunch, but they didn’t occupy any bunks and moved on fairly quickly. Then Dani, a woman from Kiel, arrived having done the whole path from Whakapapa on the clockwise circuit in 6½ hours. We chatted over lunch, which was for me the last of the bread, some salami, some cucumber from Dani, and in return I offered her some butter.

Water was boiled and left to cool, dishes were washed, the SX120 was set up for a bracketed time lapse of Ngauruhoe to the tune of people arriving. Eventually Ina also arrived and in the warm afternoon, most people were lolling about napping.

A larger group, apparently of students and a couple of adults, turned up and may have been equipped for camping and intending to stay at the campsite. In any case they stayed at a little distance to the hut, and sojourned without making much contact. After a while they decided to move on, and at the same time the weather looked like entering a major deterioration – they left up the hill into the clouds. Suspecting they may be getting themselves into more trouble than they could handle, the warden got on the mountain radio and sent out an advisory.

My SX120 was happily shooting away at Ngauruhoe, first in clear view, then as she disappeared in the clouds, and finally how she returned to view.

YouTube

Sox, feet & crocs were washed, and then Roger & Jackie turned up. Time to decant the water, and perhaps now time to cook the evening meal.

After the warden’s hut talk, Ina settled in with a number of younger Americans to play cards (some form of cumulative bridge or whist) and Roger, Jackie and I sided up with the warden to exchange tramping stories. Roger had been to the Antarctic and survived on a cache of decades old butter, much like the stuff I am currently carrying around. It will last, as long as it’s cold enough.

Then the warden decided that we should play of the game of a surprising fact that nobody knew about us. One guy thought as a child that dog bikkies were good for human consumption, I decided that my stint at the head of the largest Northern German free music festival in the 80s was novel enough.