Back at the hut, it was time to stoke up that log burner, hang up the soggy boots, and dangle crispy socks from the drying rack. Odour wise, you have to have quite a strong constitution when it comes to long distance hiking. It’s often you have to sleep in a small room full of sweaty strangers and their ‘well used’ footwear, and cheesey feet! But once your used to it, there’s something homely and ‘safe’ feeling about sitting around a wood burner amongst the jumble of steaming clothes… All warm and snoozey in your dry socks and duvet-jacket. Mmmm.
But before any of that can happen, there be trees to chop! Branches and kindling to scavenge from the woods, and axe wielding to be done. Today I got a chance to do the axe-ing, and swing the weighty metal chunk about my shoulders, sending it plunging down with biblical force to smas…. Oh… ( It just makes a tiny dint in the branch ). Clearly this is going to take some time…
Many minutes later Cookie comes to investigate and sees I’ve managed to remove almost all the bark from one side of the branch, reducing it’s width by half with the force of innumerable blunt impacts along it’s length.
“It’s not going that well is it Nicky”… Haha!
“I’d be better off cutting it with my sodding pen knife than this blunt brick of an axe!”, I retorted. “Hmmm”.
“That’s it! Pioneer spirit! Yeh! We gotta a pioneer woman here.” Chipped in an elderly American, come to watch the show. I can’t publish my response to that – but in any case that might have been just the irritating patronisation I needed to brew up some tree-splitting force…
But soon stubbornness prevailed, and a stack of branches was reduced down to a neat-ish pile of ‘wooden chunks’, ready and waiting to light up our little cabin for the evening. Phewey. Imagine chopping down a giant Kauri tree back in the old days… Hardcore.
And so, trapped in the hut for one more night, Cookie set to work with the axe, and I got stuck in with the kindling to make FIRE. Very satisfying indeed. There’s not been enough fire action on this holiday so far. It’s so much fun as well! We tucked into our instant noodles and salami dinner, and sipped our rum and lime cocktails until the sun went down. Bedtime.
After last nights diminutive branch burning session, I wanted to get some proper logs for the fire tonight. I located a dead, well not really a tree, more like a large shrubbery which had all of it’s easy to hack off branches already removed, so I set about it’s more substantial trunk. First with an axe, maybe it was blunt, most likely I’m rubbish at axe-wielding, anyhow after a few minutes I was exhausted and had hardly made a dent in it.. I went back to the hut to get the saw, which made much faster progress, but not that fast, after sawing through it I was totaly worn out. I take my hat off to lumberjacks, it’s a lot harder than it looks!
Brilliant ‘vintage’ hut here. None of your girly safety warnings here. Axes, hatchets, and bone saws on every shelf, and a giant roll of bog roll. What else do you need? A proper man’s hut. Hand painted signs and maps in inches on the walls, it even invited you to take a rain gauge reading from the milk churn outside. Cool! 
Cookie and I burst into Hurunui Hut, dumping our stuff in a mound we pegged it back out into the woods, grabbing arm-fulls of twigs, and dragging small fallen trees back. Some serious rain was coming and if we wanted dry boots for tomorrow, we’d better get some fire on the go!
We arrived at the hut shortly after lunch and umm-ed & argh-ed about carrying onto the nearby hot spring in the afternoon to camp. But were a bit reluctant to camp in this sandfly infested valley and slightly worried that it might piss it down. The next hut, Hurunui No.3, was 4 hours away which wouldn’t leave us much time to enjoy the hot pools so we decided to stay here tonight. Good decision! Shortly after while out collecting firewood the rain clouds finally caught us up and promptly pissed it down all evening.
So after the terrible news of our ‘camping adventure’ had sunk in, we again busied ourselves with the evenings work of firewood gathering, ‘axe-ing’ ( ahem ), and kindle-er-izing. I’m hoping to get a look-in on this axe-in’ business soon, test the water so to speak, but I fear it may be a long time before the novelty wears off for Cookie!
“What you doing tonight Cookie?”
