Day 41, a day of intense preparation

We are going trekking for three days through the Fjordlands tomorrow morning and will have only the stuff we can carry on our backs to sustain us for the entire journey (our nights will be spent in “tramp huts” – how decadent). Today was therefore a day of intense preparation, and so we rose at around midday and strolled into town to take care of our first tasks: buying new trousers and getting our hair cut (results above, trousers not shown).

Well, after a glass of champagne by the lake we went to Freshchoice and bought what we imagined might be sufficient food to sustain us for the duration of the walk. Important questions were asked, such as: How many cream crackers can be considered a dinner? Does the lightness of a packet of Cup-a-Soup outweigh its lack of nutritional content? Are sardines an appropriate side-dish to freeze dried beef teriyaki? (All of these questions will be answered in our next blog entry, following experimentation).

We have a large amount of packing to do, and everything in our already bulging luggage has to be filtered and the key items repacked into our smaller rucksacks. Knowing this to be an enormous and time consuming task, we went to a lovely Italian restaurant – Luciano – for chicken livers and pasta, washed down with a splendid glass of Otago sauvignion blanc.

Twenty to midnight and we are still packing...