Hikers Wool Blog

Whenever I could, I used to tramp and hunt in the mountain ranges of the lower North Island of New Zealand.

I preferred the hunting, for an occasional feed of venison for my family. My hunting motto was “walk a little, look a lot”.

I did not hunt for trophies.

I was not a very successful hunter, but after a hard weeks work ‘pushing a pen’ in a noisy office I relished the solitude in the bush, the physical hard work ‘bush-bashing off the tracks, or up on the ‘tops’ and then coming steeply down with my HikersWool protecting my feet from the dreaded black-toes, the slippery slips, swimming the gorges ( if it was safe to so), the river-crossings and occasionally sleeping rough under a log in the bush with the occasional tree-Wetas for company or on a grassy river flat with “Pepe” my, permitted, Labrador.

Tramping with our young family and friends was especially fun, even when a “friend” loaded up a couple of good-sized river-rocks, un-noticed by me, into the bottom of my already overweight pack!

We find New Zealand’s bush quite unique. The musty smell of decaying vegetation, the entanglement of the second growth, the incredible variety and number ferns dripping with sparkling water in gullies and the towering Podocarps filtering the sunlight, the secretive almost silent birds and rough winding narrow tracks often bristling with exposed tree roots requiring one to watch ones step. Sit down quietly for a while in the New Zealand bush and you will soon see and hear the birds.

During our travels the nearest thing that we have found to New Zealand bush has been in the impenetrable forest at Bwindi in Western Uganda. But there, the sounds of the forest birds are almost deafening and Africa of course, has the never-to-be-forgotten special smells of wild animals.