This post is my attempt to make sense of where the significant boundaries lie in the replacement 1:50000 Topo50 map series pushed out by Land Information New Zealand last September to replace the old 260 series. I can’t guarantee how much if it will be useful, but as always comments, feedback and experienced elaboration are welcome.

A couple of weeks ago, I took part in a bulk order of the new Topo50 maps, which replace the old 260 series that’s been in publication for several decades until now. I’m now the owner of 18 Topo50 maps to get me started, having picked up most of them for $3.50 each, around half the usual retail price. You can get this price (which includes GST but not postage) if you have a bulk order or 20 or more maps direct from LINZ, which makes it useful for clubs or groups of friends who know in advance what they want. I wrote about these maps last year, including more detail about why it’s actually happening and what the main changes are. The new maps have a couple of obvious differences:
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In a trip report last week, I wrote about a certain recipe for something called “Mt Doom — a Chocolate Volcanic Cake“. It’s based around staple ingredients such as 1 cup of drinking chocolate, a whole cup of chocolate chips, half a cup of strawberry jam, an unspecified amount of greek yoghurt (to counter the jam, I think), a little chilli powder to taste, one entire litre of “gooey raspberry ripple ice-cream”, and 3 token cups of couscous just to make the entire thing healthy. This recipe was published on page 18 of FMC Bulletin 178 (from November 2009), and its submitter claims it will serve “12 hungry trampers”. Reading the recipe over and over whilst lying in a tent, stuck behind a swollen river for 2 extra nights on a food budget, it’s unclear just how 12 people will be satisfied. It was in such circumstances that I decided I’d make the whole thing when I got back, and I’d appreciate it.

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:
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For all of today, Wellington was doing a cute thing that it does several times a year. The clouds come in low over the harbour and drift over the city. Living in the hills, it’s possible to either be inside the clouds, or above them and looking down over a flat desert of smooth drifty white. In Northland, on the western side of the Tinakori Hill, our view of Otari Wilton’s Bush was relatively clear but for the walls of fog creeping around the end of the hill and making their way towards us, but always evaporating before they reached us. Many people living in the cloud would stay at home for the day, believing it to be dreary and depressing weather, but I find walking through this subtle kind of environment fascinating.

Stacey and I went for a walk down into the central city, 20-50 minutes away depending on urgency, and the view over the harbour was iconic of these kinds of days. Much of the mist would have evaporated by the time we saw it at 11.30am, but with the Orongorongas highlighted by their contrast in the background behind the city and the harbour as they lead towards the southern extent of the Tararuas, it’s a good sight all the same.

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The sanctity of any conserved area, be it national park, scenic reserve, or historic reserve, can be violated at will by the State acting under Sections 7, 32 and 39 of the National Parks Act, under Sections 16, 34 and 97 of the Scenic Reserves and Domains Act or, if either of these avenues by any mischance should fail, under Sections 13(a), 311 and 312 of the Public Works Act. Neither Parliament, nor, least of all, the public at large, need be informed of what is proposed to be done. The first they know is, all to often, heralded by works activity or accomplished fact.

— Dr J. T. Salmon, Senior Lecturer in Biology, Victoria University of Wellington. Heritage Destroyed — The Crisis in Scenery Preservation in New Zealand. 1960. Page 11.

I remember growing up in the 1980s with the devoted belief that New Zealand was a clean and green, environmentally sound country. We had a wonderful conservation estate that was open for exploration and fantastic scenery, though it took me a while to discover it properly. New Zealand was completely anti-nuclear, unlike the French who were exploding test nukes nearby, and in related actions committed acts of terrorism in New Zealand, and it was terrorism according to France’s own condemnation before French agents were caught and its government was forced to admit guilt. France threatened wide-spread European Economic Embargoes against New Zealand until we gave back their secret agents, or something like that. This entire event was a major boost to sentiments against nuclear power, which New Zealand didn’t have and therefore New Zealand was clean and green. There was even a movie about the valiant New Zealand neighbourhood watch group catching two bumbling French secret agents (or something like that), starring well known New Zealanders such as Sam Neill and Xena Warrior Princess!

My friends and I knew that New Zealand was clean and green because the French government was exploding nuclear bombs in our back yard, and we weren’t. And we also had earthquake drills in school during which we screamed and dived under tables, and mohawks were the new rage of fashion. If it were today, I imagine we’d be clean and green because we don’t like the way Japanese vessels hunt intelligent friendly whales in the southern ocean. Fallacies are a wonderful thing for self-assurance.

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I bought myself a new compass yesterday, which was another Silva Field 7 baseplate compass, identical to the one that I lost last October. It’s the most basic Silva compass on the market. It’s often marketed as being “ideal for youth and beginners”. For me it seems to do the job perfectly well and while I’m not a navigation supremo, I’ve been working on it for a while now and I’ve not yet had any issues with having only the basic features. I guess they market it that way to drive people towards the more expensive parts of their range.

For several months I’ve been using a baseplate Coleman compass that I found at Rebel Sport for a quarter of the price, and for me at least it works just as well as the Silva Field 7. It’s slightly larger though, if only because it includes extra features like a magnifier that I never use, and ultimately that’s why I decided to replace it. It’s only after I’d been using a smaller Field 7 compass for a while that I noticed the Coleman compass was actually quite heavy, and that’s why I bought myself another Field 7.

It’s a shame they’re priced at about $35 for something so basic, which I think is more of a branding thing than anything else. If I could get a cheap un-branded compass of similar specifications then I would, but they’re hard to find on short notice. I suppose that all you really need is a magnetically sensitive needle inside a nicely divided circle. It probably helps some people to have a few features like a better grips on the dial thingee and a magnifier for maps (which I’ve personally never used), but I’ve yet to see anyone using something like a typically expensive sighting compass for tramping navigation in New Zealand. Perhaps it’s a consequence of the circles I associate with. They’re in the shops a lot so they must sell, and I’m quite interested to know what sorts of activities people use them for.

Michelle recently posted thoughts about her Platypus hydration system, which inspired me to write something about my own experiences. I’ve been thinking about writing about this for a while, but hadn’t really formulated it in my head until now.

In case you didn’t know, a hydration bladder is a water-holding bladder with a hose attached. They typically sit in a pack that you’re wearing, and the attached hose makes it easy to keep sipping water on an ongoing basis without having to stop and unpack a water bottle. In this day and age, a variety of backpacks are designed for use with hydration bladders, and often have a small gap through which a hose can be fed. Platypus is the brand-name for a well known line of hydration bladder products put out by a holding company called Cascade Designs, which also does a bunch of other well known outdoor brands like MSR and Therm-a-Rest. Their main competition in the trendy-looking shiny-hydration-bladder industry, at least in New Zealand, seems to come from CamelBak, which makes a range of backpacks designed to hold hydration systems, but will also sell the plastic bladders individually.

A plethora of more generic brands also exist, which are typically much cheaper and probably at least as good. Thanks to the name recognition, however, “Platypus” and “CamelBak” are often used as generic names, at least in the circles where I associate, to simply mean “some kind of water hydration system that isn’t a cheap and nasty plastic bottle”. I discovered this when I noticed that many people were referring to my Platypus as a Camelbak without really caring that it wasn’t. Ironically now that I have a Camelbak, I’ve already heard at least two people refer to it as a Platypus, and nobody has yet called it a Camelbak. They’re basically all water bladders, and for some reason not many people seem to like boasting that they’re drinking out of their bladder. Maybe this is why there’s a preference for using the brand names.

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So anyway, here’s what happened to my new boots. In summary, be cautious before buying Salomon Alp 7 GTX boots, because in my opinion they aren’t that great. To be fair, my opinion’s probably been influenced by the problems I’ve had with getting them fixed under warranty.

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