TWalk

Made it to the 5th of May! Missed out on a cinco de Mayo party.. for something much better: 24 hours of nearly no sleep, lots of sheep and many fleet feet.

So twalk (1 syllable) is the tramping club's extravaganza of all things dear to Kiwi's hearts - long rugged walks, tussock covered hills, barbed wire fences, sheep, mud, swams, endless river crossings, orienteering, sheep, moonlit adventures, good food, sheep, a challenge and mud. We all were happy that our maps were laminated!

This was a walk in the park compared to what half our team did... they managed to crawl through a few hundred meters of Madagari (sp?) then through a tunnel of thorns inches over the creek. 

Clues were all over the place. 

And Bobby was indeed wearing a stuffed Kimono.

So the proof of having been to the waypoints. We got all of the first leg. Didn't do so hot after that.

Almost to the "hash house", our meeting point for the evening. So much good food to be had! We ate dinner and headed out an hour before dark. It was the night of supermoon so we hardly needed headlamps! Didn't help much though. We spent 9.5 hours out on leg 2 and didn't get much of it. Took a 3 hour nap on the floor of the sheep shearing barn we were all set up in, and ran off to leg 3. It was a long night, but really amazing to see the moon so large and bright, lots of headlamps and keep bumping into random friends in the middle of very questionable patches of very rural NZ farmland.

The incredible hulk of course.

Morning fog on Lake Colridge

After doing half of leg 3 completing a challenge board item, doing awards and playing with electric  fences (maybe that was just me) everyone fell asleep in the sun while waiting 3 hrs for the buses to show up. Somehow they thought we needed pickup exactly one week later..

These two are borrowed from Henry. This is on the 3rd clue in leg 2, supermoon rising for the night! Great weather! Pretty frosty though.

This hasn't been rotated, but may as well be in this orientation. The two real lessons of the event were nothing about orienteering.

1: If you see a field of Madagari - no matter how bad it looks, you can get through.

2: NZ is not all an idyllic movie set from Middle Earth, but you can still get swallowed into the dead marshes in what looks exactly like a field.

As grumpy as I might sound through an ocean of fiber optic cable and a whole bunch of microprocessors, Twalk was really pretty fun. A little bit of that 9 hour leg was type II fun, but then I gave up on trying to score well and we started joking about how hard the clues were and how clueless we were (heh). 

I also scored 5kg of sliced carrots that I never quite finished... that alone was almost worth the entry fee.

One of the organizers put up lots of twalk pictures for you to see!