Mueller Hut Tramp
The Mueller Hut tramp - this is where we found out how poorly equipped we were for the extremes of tramping in New Zealand. We have brought our summer walking gear and light waterproofs with us, leaving all our heavy duty wet/cold weather gear at home as were not expecting to need it, but we had not bargained for the rain and the cold….
Day one of our tramp started well, with the sun shining and some really pretty views up the valley. For about an hour. And then it started to rain. And it continued to rain. We were wet through pretty quickly, but we perservered with the idea that it must clear up at some point. How wrong we were! We finally arrived at the Mueller Hut to find no lovely fire as we’ve come to expect from our stays in the huts in the European Alps, and we were freezing. To make matters worse, we hadn’t carried up any chocolate. Miserable!
Anyway we made the best of the evening, comforted by the fact that others were turning up looking much more ill-equipped than we were! And it turned out that the hut warden was from Sheringham - so the evening turned to reminiscing about the Norfolk, the UK and Giles and the Warden confusing all other occupants with their strange Norfolk dialect and phrases!
The next morning was very Christmassy, with snow on the ground and a chill in the air that made us feel like we were at home. The snow soon turned to rain though, and we had another long wet walk back down to the village, without having seen any of the views that were supposed to make the tramp so awesome. We were very glad to get to the YHA and have a warm shower. Yet somehow, we still managed to enjoy the tramp and are glad we stuck it out even though we had to content ourselves with checking out the views on the postcards in the Information centre when we got down!
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