For those of you in the UK, we get a holiday for the Queen's Birthday and you don't. Naff eh!
The weather forecast wasn't too flash but we decided to go anyway because it had been weeks since we got out of Wellington.
We drove north for a few hours on Friday night, strategically timing our departure until after dinner so we avoided the crowds of people leaving Wellington on the long weekend. We ended up sleeping in the back of the car somewhere north of Wanganui.
On Saturday morning we continued our drive to North Egmont visitor centre and didn't actually start tramping until around midday. Our plan was to head along the Pouakai Range (a range of peaks just to the north of Mt Taranaki), spend the night in a hut, then return to the car park the next day via a track around the flank of the mountain.
There were lots of boardwalks and ladders
Including some natural ones
Unfortunately the weather wasn't that good and we didn't get great views of the mountain.
I was lucky enough to snap this shot through a gap in the clouds though.
This is a huge swamp that lies between the Pouakai Range, where we are standing, and Mt Taranaki on the left. We ended our day at Holly Hut which is just to the left of the lava dome behind the swamp.
During the night and the next day it rained with a vengeance (200 mm in 24 hours). It was quite spectacular - I had never before seen water running off, constantly, from every square meter of soil and flowing overland everywhere. Unfortunately it meant that heading back to the car wasn't an option since there were several streams that would be uncrossable.
Our extra day in the hut was an opportunity to get to know our hutmates. Most of them were a group of old boys (and girls) of the Vic Uni Tramping Club and it didn't take long to establish that we had all sorts of mutual friends and acquaintances, and some of us had actually met before. They were kind enough to share their dinner and feminist revisionist poetry with us, as otherwise we would have had to subsist on dried peaches, muesli bars and the normal old misogynistic poetry we usually take tramping.
To ward off cabin fever, we took a walk to the nearby (and normally placid) Bell's Falls. They were really raging and it was quite hard to hear each other speak. 
Piers and Jenny, you may notice that Ben is wearing an Oringi parka. He obviously likes it because he is smiling. When we got out, we were a day late so we went straight to DOC and told them we were out safely. The lady said "oh, they've already started searching for you, I'll go and call them to let them know they can stop looking". We thought it was a bit odd they'd started looking for us, given the weather conditions and that we were only a day late - it turned out that they were actually looking for another couple, but we'd been at the hut with them and could report that they were on their way out and not far behind us. Excitement all round!
