Time goes on and appetites change. Two or three small town pub meals later, I’d lost my appetite for this gooey chocolate, strawberry and raspberry wonder-cake, or at the very least eating the entire thing. I still wanted to see how it’d come out, however, and eventually decided to divide all ingredients by three.

It’s a simple recipe. The couscous gets mixed with twice as much water, the drinking chocolate, chilli powder and eventually the chocolate chips, creating chocolate-flavoured couscous. Once it’s cooled, the idea is drop the ice-cream into a (large) bowl, then tip the couscous mixture over the top. After this, the jam and yoghurt gets smothered over the top to make it look more volcano-like. (I refused to buy the raspberry swirl ice-cream because it was far too expensive, so bought some kind of triple chocolate ice cream instead.)

After a first effort, this was the result.

Several amateur insights occur following this cooking expedition:

• My first effort didn’t look very volcanic.
• Despite having imagined I could gulp the entire thing in the space of a few minutes when I first saw the recipe, it may not have been very healthy, or easy, to do so. Having made only a third of the original recipe, Stacey and I tried to get through it for dessert but we only managed half of it.
• The recipe looks like dessert, but the amount of couscous suggests it could almost be a main meal, though devoid of things like vegetables. It felt too filling for dessert, though.
• It’s very sweeeeeeet.
• In hindsight I don’t think I let the couscous mixture cool down enough before pouring spooning it over the ice-cream. The whole thing went quite mushy when it mixed with the ice-cream.
• I’m not clear on how this is a regular tramping recipe, mostly because of the ice cream. I suppose if you’re not going far, and able to make it before the ice cream’s melted you’d be fine. Or perhaps you could carry a portable petrol generator and use it to power one of those mini-bar freezers which could be being carried by a co-tramper. It’d be awkward though, as you’d have to keep the power cord between two people from snagging on everything.
• I had trouble pouring the jam over the mountain as the recipe instructed. My lava wanted to stick together in clumps, so I had to come down on it with a big crunching spoon and smear it over the sides. Do I need to buy a certain kind of jam, or treat it somehow?

Well, at least now I’ve done it. It was nice but it’s a shame I can’t transport it back in time and space by a couple of weeks and 250 kilometres west.

Date: 10th November, 2007
Location: Tararua Forest Park, Ngatiawa Road-End.
People: Just me.
Huts visited: Kapakapanui Hut (0 nights).
Intended route: Start at the road-end, follow the loop track clock-wise up to Kapakapanui Hut, continue to Kapakapanui Trig, then continue back down to the road-end. Walk very fast.

I’m calling this a daywalk, which is usually is, but I’m not sure if it still counts if it’s walked in three hours.

I decided to go clock-wise again for no particular reason. I saw a few people along the way, including one group of seven (who looked like a tramping club group), four people walking at least three dogs between them, and another chap much later who was also walking a dog. Apparently it’s quite a popular place for walking dogs, although I noticed at least one of them was being allowed to frolic around in the bush without the attention of its owner a bit more than I thought it should have been.

Everyone who I met was going around clock-wise, just as I was. I did get slightly confused around the river near the beginning, mostly because I didn’t remember some bits of it from a couple of weeks before. It just goes to show how easy it is to miss when walking with a group of people, I guess.

There was almost no wind this time, although the tops were a little clouded in, at least to the point that Kapiti Island was completely hidden, as was pretty much everything in that direction. The ridges over to the east, on the other side of the range, were just visible through the drifting cloud.

It went well, and in the end it was basically a brisk walk without any lengthy stopping (2 minutes max). In its entirity it took 3 hours and 10 minutes, which I was very impressed with considering it took us 6 hours and 40 minutes last time, and I wasn’t expecting to get through it any faster than about 4 hours at the best. In detail, I left the road at 10.50am, reached Kapakapanui Hut at 12.10pm, Kapakapanui Trig at about 12.50pm, and back to the road-end at almost 2pm. (Actually about a minute before for the pedantic.) This was all at a very brisk walking pace, and I only had about three stops for a couple of minutes at a time for some yummy yummy energy chocolate, so it’s not really realistic as a group time, unless it happens to be a group of very fast-walking people.

I’m sure one of those crazy mountain-running lunetics could do it in a couple of hours or even less (although I’d think that would be quite amazing), but personally I feel quite good right now.

Before I left New Zealand, Stacey put through a special request for me to bring lots of New Zealand chocolate. Even though I only bothered to bring some standard supermarket chocolate (500 grams of standard dairy milk, 250 grams of mint chips and 250 grams of Black Forest), I can now appreciate why.

In Chile, it’s possible to buy chocolate that’s made by Cadbury, packaged in a very similar way, and that claims to be “milk chocolate”. There’s probably a problem with the cows in Argentina where it’s manufactured, though, because as Stacey pointed out, the stuff is diabetic chocolate. It’s flavourless.

This isn’t to say that Chile can’t make good chocolate in other places. We just had some great chocolate ice cream for dinner tonight from the supermarket downstairs that was very tasty, and I got more than my share because Stacey doesn’t like chocolate ice cream anyway. They can also do chocolate milk in several different varieties, despite the fact that most of the regular milk is done as milk powder. For some reason though, they just don’t do (real) milk chocolate.

We had an interesting trip to Curico on the weekend, which is a small Levin-like town south of Santiago, where Panchi’s family lives. (Panchi is the friend of Stacey who’s letting us stay in her apartment in Santiago.) I’ll write about it later when I get time, but it’s 11.40pm so I should probably go and learn a heap of irregular verb endings for an Espanol test that I have tomorrow morning.