Trains Hut. Kapanui Conservation Area, Wanganui.
Team: Me (leader), Clinton, Ian, Karl, Danniel, Jono
If you ask any member of this weekends party what the two abiding memories of the trip are, all of them will respond with “Hook Grass” and “Amelia falling off the track”. All in all, it was both an interesting and a mind-blowingly dull weekend.
We left Wellington Friday evening on time, but in heavy traffic, and after stopping to pick Karl up on Mana Esplanade, we decided to have a slightly early dinner in Levin instead of Bulls, since we were only going as far as Wanganui for the night anyway. Noodle Canteen was over-filling as always, thank goodness Karl and I shared a bowl of dinner so he could also help Ian finish his! Our original plan was to stay at the Top 10 in Wanganui, but they weren’t cheap and we discovered that we could get a bed at a BBH hostel for only $5 per person more, so we went with that.
Tamara lodge wasn’t bad, but I would only ever stay there for one night. The beds were packed into the rooms, there was no shelving in the room so you couldn’t unpack except for onto or under your bed, and there appeared to be only three toilets for the entire hostel – two of which were in rooms shared with showers!
We would have left earlier in the morning, but reception didn’t open until 8am, which kinda sucked when we had had to pay key deposits the night before. By the time we had driven on to the road end, parked the van and organised ourselves, it was 10am and getting very warm already. Thankfully though, the sky was cloudy, although we didn’t fully appreciate this in our first two hours on exposed 4wd track until we walked out without it on Sunday. We had taken the advice of people who had been before and ensured we had all filled our water bladders before we left the backpackers, which was just as well, as there was no access to any suitable water for pretty much the whole track to the hut.
The track was… interesting. Much of it was simply a goat track on a ledge. All of it was well above the river, and good chunks of it were very narrow. The new slips we found were challenging to get across even for those comfortable with such things, and some of us were far less than confident! It was also, in places, completely covered in hook grass. Most of us were too hot to put on gaiters, so we just dealt with it, and plucked them off every time we stopped.
After 7 and a half hours walking and resting (because we were simply shattered, and demoralized because we thought we were further ahead than we were), we finally reached the hut. Out in the middle of a field that had been soaking up sunshine all afternoon, the hut was exceedingly hot on arrival. Contemplation was given to pitching the tent fly off the side of the hut by the door to create some extra shade, but everyone was just too tired!
We had all been looking forward to a hut that was nice and close to the river so it would be easy to swim. Nope. The boys went scouting and managed to find clambering access to the river that would enable a splash wash, but the gorgeous looking swimming hole just down stream remained elusively out of reach beyond a 5m or so waterfall. We had seen stairs down to the river at another swimming hole on our way in to the hut, but it had taken 20 minutes to get from there to the hut, so no-one wanted to go that far (it took us about 10 minutes to get back to that spot on Sunday morning…).
The open valley the hut was situated in got sunshine forever it seemed, so we relaxed, read, slept or enjoyed the river for what seemed like a long time before starting dinner. Well, we also ate a lot – trying to eat as much as possible of our snack food to avoid carrying it back out the next morning! A dinner of what would have been a risotto (but it didn’t quite work right with brown rice!) with veges was demolished, followed closely by freshly made cheesecake.
After that, it was finally dark and about 9pm. It was still so warm outside that several of us spent about an hour star gazing and waiting for the moon to come up. Eventually I gave up about 10pm and went to bed because we were planning an early start. Apparently the moon came up behind clouds and took ages to be seen. It was still so warm we left all the windows open and most of us slept in just our bag liners.
Sunday morning 6.30am, the alarm went off. Ouch. That’s an exceedingly early start for a trip I am on! But we knew the cycle group we were meeting in Wanganui would be there by lunchtime, so we wanted to be out as early as possible, and we wanted to start early to try and beat the heat.
The moon was still up as we took our bags outside at about 7.45am, having done a quick tidy-up of the hut before we left. It was already warm, and by the time we were 20 minutes down the track, the heat was starting to radiate back at us from the ground! However, we were making much better time than we had on Saturday and all felt pretty good. We were very glad of the fact that the track was pretty much flat – gently undulating, only one good climb, and that only took us about a minute!
Eventually, however, fatigue started to kick in and I lost concentration for a moment on the narrow track and suddenly found myself off balance, falling off the side of the track. I barely had time to let out a yell of shock before I had managed to dig my toes in and grab the grass at the rack edge to stop myself. Thank goodness I only fell about the same distance as my own height – it was a long way down to the river if I had fallen further! I scraped my knee, twisted my ankle and pulled something in both shoulders, but I was more shocked than anything. I managed to extricate myself from my pack, which was pulled up and out of the way, and then two of the guys sat down hard up against the back of the ledge to help pull me up.
After a short rest to let me calm down a little, we decided to move on again. I was a little sore, but wanted to give it a bit of time before taking any painkillers or strapping my ankle. In the end I needed a couple of neurofen to get me to the end of the track, but that was it. Thank goodness! That was all we had by way of incidents, and we made it to the road end at 1.30.
From there, it was time to get changed into less sweaty clothing before heading back down the road that never ends to get petrol and icecream, then into Wanganui to collect the cycle tour group who had been waiting nearly 4 hours by this stage and then back home!
Photos to come soon - when I get them edited later in the week!
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