Last weekend was the
first long weekend in New Zealand since Queen’s birthday in June.
That is a long time without long weekends during winter. However, I
spent 6 weeks in Europe’s perpetual heatwave so it didn’t feel
like a long cold winter to me…
We decided to go
back to Hakatere conservation park and do a loop track to Mystery Lake, and camp at the lake.
Apparently a hot and dry summer is forecasted for NZ, and we had a start of that during the weekend. Inspired by the warm weather forecast I packed my medium-warm sleeping bag, which is also the bulkiest sleeping bag I have so my pack was already full with only the sleeping bag. Nevertheless, as a seasoned back-packer, I managed to squeeze in everything we would need in terms of food, including a bar of chocolate (a last minute decision).
We set off and
Thomas’ map reading had predicted “flat”, but this wasn’t
quite the case. As we were sweating and puffing uphill, we met the
only other people walking, going downhill and as they said hello I
recognised the lady from our local sports-domain where we had just
spent 2 weekends planting native plants with the community. Quite
funny to meet someone who is basically a neighbour, in a relatively
remote place, although I’m starting to feel it would be weird not
to meet someone we know in NZ’s outdoors.
We reached the lake and set up the tent, I tried to wash of the sweat and basically exchanged it for mud so that wasn’t a very successful wash but I felt a bit fresher. We had a nice dinner of freezedried stuff and of course chocolate. Then early to bed, listening to the quacking of duck on the lake, the quacking of frogs around the lake, and … “Thomas I hear voices!”. Some hunters passed the lake at nearly dark, I was afraid they’d set up their tent as well and hunt ducks through the night, but they walked on and we didn’t hear any shots.
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| Drinking tea and eating chocolate in front of the tent |
Soon I realised the medium-sleeping bag was not quite warm enough and I put on more and more clothes but in the end didn’t really sleep. Happy to see the first sunshine.
We walked on, down again over the glacial outwash plains with the mountains around us and the sun shining hard. I started to feel a little bit like walking through the Black Forest in a heatwave… Luckily my new summer hiking socks kept the feet relatively cool, probably also because we did step into a few hidden creeks and water puddles…
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| Pointing out dead ice lakes |
A
nice walk, and a good reminder that tramping/hiking should be on the
agenda regularly to avoid too much sore muscles the next days!
Also, the chocolate didn't like the heat so much, we should have eaten the whole bar in the evening.
