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It’s probably just as well I didn’t go tramping in the Tararuas, though. At times it still felt as if I was only using 2/3 of my lungs. The last time I went tramping with a cold like that I had a rather bad time (also because of silly decisions I made about what to wear at critical times, to be fair), and it wouldn’t have been good for anyone in the group given the yucky weather on Saturday and all the bush-bashing in that region. Now two weeks later I can still notice the effects, and I hate the way the remnants of colds can just hang around sometimes, but I think it’s dissipating now.

In unrelated news, Stacey and I are about to head overseas to South-East Asia for 3.5 weeks. (Specifically Thailand, Laos and Vietnam.) It’s the first proper holiday we’ve had for a couple of years and it’ll be fantastic to get away for a while. I suspect there’s not a lot of Wellington-based tramping in that part of the world, however, so I’m unsure how much I’ll update this blog during the coming month. When we return in mid-November I’m expecting one potentially stressful week and weekend at work, and after that I’m certain I’ll want to get out for a tramp or two.

Meanwhile, we’ve been down to Otari-Wilton’s Bush a few times recently, which is within an easy walking distance and has helped to pass the time. It’s a very nice place to wander around. I suppose it’s one of the reasons I enjoy Wellington so much, given that between all the population it’s still easy to find places where it feels as if you’re much further away.

On an unrelated meta note, I’ve been tinkering with the code to make it easier to monitor comments posted to this site, if you happen to be that way inclined. There are now RSS feeds for comments on the entire site (check the upper-right corner of this page), or for individual posts (scroll to the end of any post). Also, if you post a comment, you should now be able to tick a box to receive an email if and when any follow-up comments are posted. Furthermore, there’s now a Preview button which should help to give you some idea of what the comment might look like without having to actually post it.

The other notable technical change has been some of the OpenID-related things. If you have an OpenID, it should now be easier to use it to log in or to leave a comment here without having to create an account, and so on. If you don’t have one, and don’t wish to have one, of course, you should still be able to manually type a name when entering a comment. Please let me know if you happen to notice anything that doesn’t seem to be working properly with any of this.

Earlier this afternoon I ordered a couple of permits for next Saturday. I only hope that DOC’s online booking has improved since I last used it about 3 years ago, when we booked some huts on the Abel Tasman Coast Track (aka the Hiker’s Superhighway). That time we booked the huts about 3 months in advance, as soon as the online booking system was opened for that period. This seriously confused the DOC ranger at Anchorage Hut on the first night, who tried to tell us we didn’t have tickets. It turned out that because we’d booked as soon as we were able, the records of our tickets were off the end of her print-out.

The very same booking system also seemed in disarray when we reached Whariwharangi Hut. Despite us having booked so far in advance, every one of the three other groups of people who turned up that night had all been told by various DOC officers that they’d be the only people in the hut that evening. Not that we minded — we had a great time teaching the visiting Germans how to play 500. Apparently almost nobody books great walks that far in advance, and we came out thinking we were very strange people.

To be fair to DOC, it was during the off-season (May) and in Abel Tasman it’s a good bet that the huts will never be full at that time of year. Consequently I don’t think DOC took the bookings as seriously. Most Great Walk users are overseas tourists, and tend to book a few days beforehand through the backpackers’ they’ve been staying at… at least at that time of year. We only saw three New Zealanders on that entire walk which consisted of that DOC ranger, and two fun old guys at Whariwharangi Hut, but I’ve been told guess that’s what to expect on a typical Great Walk.

As for Kapiti Island, we still have to arrange the boat ride, and there are currently two choices, both of which we’ll probably consider on the easy-to-find information on their respective websites, because we don’t have much else to go on. For instance, Kapiti Tours advise that they have a “well maintained, clean vessel”, whereas Kapiti Marine Charter advise that they provide a “well presented, clean, and stable vessel”. By that comparison, I suppose it comes down to how exciting we’d like the ride to be. Kapiti Tours advise that they’ve transported such famous film crews as those from King Kong, Whale Rider and Country Calendar. Kapiti Marine Charter, on the other hand, advise they’ve transported The American Ambassador, “staff from most Embassies” in Wellington, Prime Ministers, Sir David Attenborough, and so on. By this comparison, I imagine the decision comes down to whether we’d rather go with a company that transports politicians, or a company that transports film crews.

It’s a tough decision, but I’m sure they’re both great so it probably doesn’t really matter.

Oh, and a small meta note which has nothing to do with Kapiti Island: If you’re reading this then it means you’re probably looking at my new web server, which is hosted by a new provider. It’s a little slower (at the moment). I’m now paying for and supporting the whole thing myself rather than sharing the server with others, and I might also need to fine-tune a couple of things while I get a feel for what bits of it need fixing. But I hope it’s at least consistently slower, rather than being completely down for a day at a time. Unfortunately there’s only so much you can do to mend things when your website lives on a server where it has to compete for memory and CPU time with another person’s out-of-control Bittorrent client, which is what I think was causing some recent problems that motivated me to finally try and sort it out.