Feb 24 & 25

Friday night and I again found myself rushing around like a mad Englishman, trying to get some gear together for the annual pilgrimage to Lake Daniels it was also the first trip I had been on for some time so people may have started to forget my name if I didn’t go.

On the road and so started the long journey through Murchison and onto Maruia, once at the gate its about a 40 minute drive up the pothole infested goat track and onto some smooth travelling up the river, we were surprised to find the river level quite low compared to previous years.

On arrival to the camp site we were greeted by the usual big cosy fire and I showed my appreciation of this with a set of nasty spot lights in the eyes of the ladies and gentleman enjoying said fire.
After setting up the tent with much scratching of heads, it was finally beer o’clock, the perfect time of day for telling lies and drinking many a fizzy brown ale. We had obviously arrived a long while after some of the other partys as a few had already been indulging in said fizzy brown ales for some time.

Even though I had been on this trip 4 times before, I had not realised camp mother Cookies law on empty beer cans not being thrown onto the fire, hence why I have now the pleasure of writing this (be it late) trip report, after sitting around and telling lies for a while I couldn’t help but think that there was something amiss, pondering on this for a short while led me to discover the little green turtle and its esteemed pilot were nowhere to be seen, this I thought was a tad unusual as his brother and his yellow submarine were present, and the two of them are normally seen on nearly all trips be it on their own or together.
That’s all I have to say about that as I can’t comment on not showing up on club trips.

After the last of the stragglers had stumbled off to their sleeping bags a short sleep ensued and we were up the next morning for a quick drive down the riverbed to Reid’s store to meet the troops coming in on Saturday morning.
After having to run down to springs junction for to fill up my big, monkey juice sucking example of cheap Japanese engineering, we arrived back at the store to find only about 15 vehicles present and accounted for compared to the usual 30 or so, we then had a reasonably uneventful journey in through the farmers land with the only hold ups being a brand new set of Simex tyres having been incorrectly mounted. 3 tyres had to be popped off the bead, cleaned and remounted which is normally great fun in the middle of nowhere, though with an expert bush tyre fitter and his specially built Chrysler bead popping tool the job was done each time with little fuss.

The trip up the river was very different to normal years in that the ground was so dry we could go places where previously it was quite a mission, small steep banks that had caused much problems in the past were easy enough to idle up in low low gear, with most of the going so easy I could hear the fizzy brown ales in the chillybin at the campsite calling my name, either that or it was god.

We arrived at the campsite with plenty of hot sun left for the rest of the afternoon so after sampling some nectar from the tui brewery, which incidentally is brewed by gorgeous women, we heroically gathered the wood for the evenings fire, being the strong hunter gather types us men were, the mighty aforementioned juice guzzling Nissan Kenworth was gallantly employed in log truck duties carting massive chunks of log back to the firewood pile till the pile was quite big enough to last a week.

The sun then went behind the hill and instantly we froze, we soon had the fire roaring and a dent grew in the fizzy brown ale supply while many lies were told and tears were shed over the impressive dent in the side of dangerous dons new Lamb Coozer.

The local highlight of the valley at night is boob hill which when the moon shines makes a hill look like a giant boob, as you may have been able to work out, other highlights of the night are not so family friendly so I shan’t go into any more detail, instead we’ll cut to the trip out the next morning down the river, the hard way, which wasn’t actually that hard this time anyway, out to the road up to the Murchison pub and then home, so as you can see, once again a brilliant trip into a brilliant place with the company of some not so brilliant minds, a trip I wont miss next year or the year after that or the year after that, and neither should you, so I’ll see YOU there next year on my one yearly outing.

THE ONE