Our house is a very very very fine house

Last weekend we walked the Tongariro Crossing with Chris and others. But first, we thought it was high time we bombarded you with some mundane details of our lives in Wellington.

This is our flat (the white one with the grey roof). We have the top flat. As you can see, it's nearly surrounded by bush and sits above a fairly steep little gully. This means we get lots of tui and bellbirds shitting on our car. We've also had kaka overflying our house and squawking away, pretty cool! It gets sun most of the day, which is unusual in Wellington.

Things were a bit grim for a week or two when we first moved in. We even borrowed the mattress that you can see! Fortunately now we have a few more comforts, though we still need a vacuum cleaner. Guests, don't look too closely at the carpet.

All the drawers that you can see are representative of the rest of the house, ie. storage capacity bordering on ridiculous! But quite handy. You should see our toy cupboard...

The view from our street. I get a full view of the harbour from the top of our street as I begin my bike ride to work, very nice. Sylv doesn't get this, but does get a nice walk past the Botanic Gardens after she's slithered her way down the Military Track (down the aforementioned gully) past Julia's house.

This is the view from our bedroom window. Look at those suckers in the shade! Can you spot the ludicrously long cable car access lift?

For those who haven't caught up on our news, I've been working at CPG Ltd (an engineering consultancy) for about six weeks now, as a drainage engineer. Basically, dealing with a lot of poos and wees! Fun :-) Quite complex and tricky jobs now (though not so much from a design sense) and I've been thrown in at the deep end a bit with people leaving.

Sylv is working in the Research Data and Reporting team at the Ministry of Fisheries. She is a Senior Business Analyst, didn't you know! She's still finding out exactly what that means but is enjoying it so far. We'll see how much she enjoys it on Monday after doing a running race called the Gutbuster on Sunday.

A Month in Summer

Hello loyal readers. If you thought we'd been up to nothing since we got back to New Zealand, this post should put you right. Sylvia and I have had a most excellent month and here it is in summary. I apologise that it's still quite a long summary but I hope you enjoy the pictures!

Nearly a month ago, I left Chch with my Dad to head over to our family bach (pronounced "batch", a Kiwi word meaning holiday house) for some much-needed repair work. It should be noted that it always need repairs (it's 80 or 90 years old in a wet environment) so this is not unusual.

This time it needed a new section of pitched roof on the front side of the house. Taking bits of roof or cladding off the bach is always an adventure because you never know what you'll find underneath. (Well actually, you know that you'll always find rot, you just don't know how much or where). Over a couple of days we managed to replace the entire front section of roof, replace or bridge rotten purlins and barge boards and even get a coat of paint on the whole thing in between rain showers and the power company disconnecting/shifting/reconnecting our power supply since it was actually bolted to the roof (very illegal apparently).

Dad doing the actual work while I take photos

Sylvia came and joined us for a night, then Sylv and I headed up north to Little Wanganui (just south of Karamea) to walk in to "Moonsilver", her parents' place in the back of Golden Bay. We walked the Wangapeka-Karamea-Leslie tracks, then crossed the Tablelands to the Old Upper Takaka track which leads directly to their place! Kinda handy.

"Little" Wanganui River

Unfortunately it pissed down on the day we'd intended starting. We only got about an hour down the track before reaching a side creek that we couldn't safely cross. After sitting around scowling for a while, we retreated to a fortuitously-located backpackers and spent the night there.

Yep, that's Sylvia standing on the track. Give us a smile, love!

After the first day's setback, things improved over the next couple of days until we were tramping in bright sunshine on pleasant tracks by the Karamea (in constrast to the less pleasant tracks of the Wangapeka and Taipo).

Venus Hut - nearby are Apollo, Mars, and Mercury Creeks, and Thor Hut

Obligatory swing bridge photo (Karamea River)

It was nice walking down the Karamea River over a couple of days as it grew from a stream to a massive flow. It is a beautiful and remote river, and I can understand why people go to the trouble of flying in to the head of it for rafting and kayaking. In fact, we saw Clare McLennan's name in one of the hut books!

Sylvia and Teresa

We met an English girl, Teresa, at Venus hut. We'd already done a pretty good job of stalking her via boot prints and entries in hut books and had put together a surprisingly accurate profile of her (age, height, hair colour and length, personality and pack colour) before we met her. Since we were arriving quite late at the hut, we weren't sure how much this solo tramper would appreciate our company but it turned out she was glad to see us and we enjoyed tramping with her for the next two days.

Karamea Bend Hut - "Strike a pose, honey". We were soon driven inside by the sandflies.

We hadn't got a good look at the scenery in the Little Wanganui and Taipo Rivers, but as we climbed up the Leslie River from its confluence with the Karamea, we were treated to some stunning valley and tops views (as well as this sunset).

Splugeons Rock Shelter

I was surprised to find the Splugeons Rock Shelter wasn't a rock shelter at all, but a shelter built on top of Splugeons Rock. It had the most character of all the shelters we visited, including a fabric feature wall and a tribute to Sir Edmund Hilary!

View from the head of the Leslie River back towards West Coast

Emerging onto the Tablelands

Tramping across the Tablelands

Dry Rock Shelter

We bid farewell to Teresa at Salisbury Lodge on the Tablelands (it was a bit full for our liking) and continued another 1/2 hr to Dry Rock Shelter. It was neat to sleep on the wooden platform built under an overhanging rock, and we had the place to ourselves.

From there we walked the remaining 6 hours or so to Moonsilver the next day, arriving one day late on Christmas Eve! Once it became clear that our two days worth of emergency snack food rations would only need to last one day, we managed to eat them in half a day. Funny how that happens.

Unfortunately we didn't take any Christmas photos but here follow some random photos from Moonsilver over the next few days. First my parents arrived on Boxing Day to stay two days, then a trickle of friends arrived over the next two days to spend New Years up there. Lots of the photos were in caves, because the property is riddled with them.

Culvert Cavern

A morepork! (Small native owl)

Dad in the main Silverlode cave

Clockwise from L: Sylvia, Piers, Jana, Julian, Jenny, Sue and Chris

Moonsilver Golf was another popular pastime. It is played with hockey sticks and has some interesting rules.

Steve and I shot a couple of goats. Mmm, barbecued goat.

All my New Years Eve photos are blurry or grainy. Sparkler photos are easy though.

View over Westhaven Inlet from Knuckle Hill on the Kaituna Track

After New Years, we all headed our separate ways. A few people came and went from Takaka and we managed to do a bit of climbing, walking and a run along the 18 km, rough but beautiful Kaituna Track.

Now Sylvia and I are back in Christchurch, managing to find time to socialise and have fun as well as doing the many things that must be done before we move north in a week or so. Our next blog post will probably be from Wellington!

Happy New Year everyone.