Further Wanderings

I’ve noticed that my descriptions of hiking/tramping/trekking trips in the past have been, depending on your perspective, exhaustive or exhausting. I’ll see what I can do about limiting this one, but it doesn’t promise to be easy, as quite a bit of note really did happen on this trip.

I worried a bit that, it being Labour Day weekend, the trails and huts would be full of fellow trampers. With this in mind, I arranged to leave work early, and caught the 13:00 train to headed up the Wairarapa line from Wellington central station. On boarding I could hardly believe that I was aboard the commuter rail service of New Zealand’s capital city in 2006. The cars looked antique, perhaps 50 or 60 years old, and, though it’s been a while, I don’t think it would be incorrect to say that I’ve travelled in passenger carriages in Malaysia and Thailand that looked in better shape than these. And the surly staff, who chastised me for bringing my pack aboard (when there was no indication that a luggage car even existed) didn’t help create any more positive an impression. For all that I really shouldn’t complain, as the trip wasn’t actually uncomfortable, and was a short one of just over an hour.
[read on]

At this point the narrative character of my ‘blog is going to take a downturn for a while. This is explained by the fact that I’ve now been in Wellington for 6 weeks or so, and have actually settled into a bit of a routine. Any even moderately comprehensive narrative would, thus, get a bit repetitive. So for the next little while, I suspect entries will be more like lists of interesting events and observations about Wellington than running stories of the day-to-day.

Thus:
[read on]

That's not a rhetorical question that I've been asking myself or anything. It genuinely is the subject of this post. I'm sure at least a few of you might be interested in how my days, weeks (and by ... [Continue reading this entry]