I’ve been on call at work in the past few days, which means I wasn’t supposed to wander too far from civilisation last weekend just in case the building burned down and somebody needed to trundle into town and validate the parking of the fire trucks, or something like that. Sunday was otherwise boring so I ended up going for a wander along the Skyline Walkway, which I figure should be okay because it’s relatively civilised and there are many exit points in case I needed to get back to a road or anything. Here are some photos (biased towards the Kaukau end of the walk), and here’s the map of the day:

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I put on my number three pair of boots, which tend to get used if I think I might need to walk on some road, and headed down the hill. Having left home at around 11.30am after hanging out the washing. This began with a walk down into Otari Wilton’s Bush, not far from where I currently live, then straight up the other side of the valley up to the ridge-line where the Skyline Walkway is situated.
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This evening I was walking home over the Tinakori Hill — part of the town belt between my workplace and home. It’s interesting to see how the various tracks change. Some tracks are officially recognised and always well maintained, but others come and go. Last year, my most direct route was almost straight up a gully on what was a fairly wide four wheel drive track, even though I never saw a vehicle. It’s never been a very accessible road because it’s so steep, but for a long time the only other route was comparably indirect.

About 6 months ago, the local city council built a new well graded track (it even has a handrail) that switches up the end of the spur at one end of the valley. It switches so much that it takes longer, but it’s less steep. The original route, which I still try to use because of its directness, gradually becomes overgrown as time goes on. It will probably be inaccessible within a year or two if it’s not properly cleared, but meanwhile I’m continuing to use it. Earlier tonight, I must have disturbed about 50 small birds as I walked up, which never happened in the past, and it occurred that the high grass and scrub growth is becoming a haven for them as the bush takes over once again.
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Yesterday I went for a walk, a week after returning home, to try and get back into the swing of things. It first took me to Ngauranga (I needed to buy something from LV Martin), but then I just kept on walking. It turned into quite a nice day, although by the end I had a couple of blisters on the soles of my feet, and ache in a few places. I think this is symptomatic of me having been a few weeks without much exercise, but hopefully I’m on the way to loosening up.

I found a new way into Belmont Regional Park that I’d previously not known about, heading up through Granada North where there’s a new sub-division going in, then just following the roads until they fade away. In hindsight I think I might have accidentally crossed about 50 metres of private land (hopefully no more), which I realised upon emerging at the end of someone’s driveway, so I’m not 100% sure if there’s a complete public access corridor going through there.

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Nearly two years ago I wrote about how I often find the lingering smoke annoying when I go for walks around town. It’s difficult to walk along a main street in Wellington’s CBD during certain times of day without having people in front breathing out cigarette smoke (much worse than campfire smoke), holding cigarettes venting smoke in the faces of people crowded behind, and throwing used cigarette butts into the city’s drainage system, causing even more problems [Ref 1] [Ref 2]. Anecdotally, I think this has become more of an issue since the Smoke-Free Environments Amendment Act of 2003 came into force. The act made it illegal for people to smoke inside most workplaces and also any cafe’s/restaurants (because they’re other people’s workplaces), but didn’t do much to account for the changes this would cause in outside environments. It forces people to smoke on the streets rather than inside, and it means virtually all restaurants, pubs and cafe’s (not wanting to lose customers to competitors) have pushed their smoking sections onto tables outside. Frequently these outside areas around footpaths are specifically designed with extra shelter from the elements, which helps cigarette smoke to linger for a very long time.

Late last month, a petition was opened on the Wellington City Council’s e-petition page titled Ban on smoking along the city’s “Golden Mile”, with the idea being that smoking on the main central Wellington streets should be completely banned — so far, the only CBD street in which a by-law prevents smoking is Cable Car Lane. As I write this, it has 550 signatures. To add to all of this, however, another e-petition titled Continue to allow smoking along Wellington’s Golden Mile was created by another local today, intending to show support for an opposing view that smoking shouldn’t be banned.
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A week ago I hoped to go tramping around the Camelbaks in the Tararuas, but wasn’t feeling well and ended up pulling out. By Sunday I thought I was doing better though, and was getting a little bored of sitting around. The weather was sunny and I found myself on a morning walk around the Karori Sanctuary Fence before ending up in Aro Valley.

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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.

I had the second half of an afternoon to kill earlier today, and went for a short walk down to Otari Wilton’s Bush, not far from where I live. Somehow I ended up on the Skyline Walkway, maybe because I forgot to stop and turn around, but it all worked out okay. This morning was calm and sunny, but by now there was an increasingly strong nor-westerly in the air, which makes sense given a southerly’s due here soon. (ie. Air circles around low pressure systems clockwise in the southern hemisphere so it was characteristic that the wind was coming from the north-west right now… I’m slowly getting better at this, heh heh.) I’d left my camera at home, but took my GPS and so ended up with this map.

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Along the ridge-top of the Skyline Walkway, the wind was really starting to blow — not to a leaning-against-it level, but certainly enough to cause the odd stumbling. It also wasn’t enough for the turbines over at the Makara Wind Farm to be switched off. The area’s full of high-tension power lines, and they make a major racket when the wind’s blowing through them to that extent.

Funnily enough, I notice that Erick Brenstrum recently wrote a short piece over on the Met Service Blog about ridge top winds, and how they operate.
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Wacky Mountain Bikies have their
own sense of humour.

I’ve already written about the Skyline Walkway at least a couple of times [1, 2], so I’ll focus more on the parts around Makara Peak.

Date: 15th August, 2009
Location: Makara Peak and Skyline Walkway, Wellington.
Route: Walk up to Makara Peak from South Karori Road, down via Zac’s Track, then along the Skyline Walkway to Mt Kaukau, and Johnsonville via Old Coach Road. (Also see the map at the end of this post.)
[Photos]
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Makara Peak is a dedicated Mountain Bike park, choca-full of mountain bike tracks that are maintained by the community. This is the second time I’ve been there. The first time (before I was really writing things down), I wandered into a few areas that caused me to be really worried that a speedy bicycle pilot would come careening around a blind corner and run me over. It didn’t feel quite the same this time, though, possibly because I had a better idea of wanting to stay to the wider tracks, and perhaps because there seemed to be less people around.
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Belmont Regional Park is an awesome place for getting out for a walk in Wellington. It’s central (literally), very accessible on most sides from public transport, and from Belmont Trig it’s possible to see how a large number of pockets of the Wellington Region all fit together. Wellington’s roads are laid out to divide the Porirua side of the region from the Hutt side in a way that causes many people to assume that they’re a long way apart. For myself, it really wasn’t until I walked through Belmont Regional Park that I really appreciated just how close the Hutt Valley is to Porirua. Being able to see them both from a central point and then be down on either side in the time of an hour or so is a really cool thing.

From Cannons’ Head down to Stratton Street.

I had some free time during rather nice weather on Sunday, and decided to drive out to Petone and spend it doing exactly this. With the opportunity, I also decided to do some red lining and take a look around a few areas of Belmont Regional Park where I haven’t yet been.

Date: 19th July, 2009
Location: Belmont Regional Park, from Cornish Street.
Route: A clockwise loop up to Belmont Trig via Bridleway, over to Cannons’ Head, down to Stratton Street and back to Cornish Street via Korokoro Dam.
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Earlier today I walked around Oriental Parade and up over the Southern Walkway, and hopping off at Kilbirnie before spending about an hour sitting under the northern end of the runway at Wellington Airport, watching the planes struggle in. It was cold, but the bank below the runway offers some partial shelter from the southerly with passing phases of rain, and it was bearable for a while with about four layers and a balaclava.

What surprised me as I walked back towards town was the number of bottle caps washed up on that part of the beach around there. There were barely any plastic bottles, but there were thousands of bottle caps. They were typically the variety that comes from soft drinks and bottled water, the latter of which I think is a bizarre, inefficient and pointless thing in New Zealand, but perhaps that’s a topic for another post.

I suppose the bottles must separate and be carried somewhere else with a different make-up and density, but apparently thousands of bottle caps end up right here. Putting thoughts about lazy thoughtless polluters and the hypocrisy of New Zealand aside, I’d love to know more about the physics of what’s happening here.

With a need to find a reasonably easy place to walk in my new shoes, I thought I might go for a wander around the Makara Beach loop. The last time I tried to do this I discovered I was a week too late, and the farm-land section of the loop had been closed for lambing (which happens between 1st August and 31st October). So thanks to transport difficulties I’ve had in the past, this was the first time I’d actually walked the ridge part of the loop.

The Makara turbines of Project West Wind.

It’s hard to talk about the Makara Beach Loop these days without talking about Project West Wind — the initiative of Meridian Energy to build a giant wind farm on Wellington’s south coast. It took years to get through the consent process, and my most vivid memory of this was one of the few meetings I attended of the Tararua Tramping Club back in 2007. The meeting involved a representative of Meridian who described the wind farm proposal with a slide-show decorated by a large photo of a cute and happy dog basking in the wind, many noisy people whom I was later informed were not regular attendees of TTC meetings, and a lot of angry heckling.

Date: 14th June, 2009
Location: Makara Loop Walk, from Makara Beach.
Route: Just doing the loop clockwise starting from the beach.
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