What made you start tramping?

For me, my parents were were trampers and used to drag us kids kicking and screaming on tramping trips when we were young. I hated it. Until one trip we went to Lake Mackenzie Hut on the Routeburn. This was in the mid 1960s before it was popular. We did a day excursion up the zig zag and I remember quite clearly looking along the track towards Harris Saddle and thinking "I wonder where that goes". I must have been about 12 -13 at the time, just old and strong enough to carry a pack. I think that is a critical time and would be cautious about introducing kids to hard tramping before that. All through High School I used to organise trips and my mates would come along. We did all sorts of crazy things, like kids do today, except without the booze and the cars. Somehow we survived and came out the better for it.

I grew up in Belmont in the hutt valley which at that time was semi rural (hard to imagine now but the hills and bush started at the western hut road. As kids we where incouraged to spend alot of time outdoors often heading of at 7 in the morning to return at 7 at night. The area didnt have a scout troop so the local families started one. It was a glorified tramping club from the begining and as we aged the distances from home grew. Like pmcke it was helped by wondering what was over the next ridge tempted i have to say by the tararuas on my doorstep.

I started late i had to find something to do for my 50th so i had my 50th on the second day of the Milford Track Walk

I was a bit later than that, had my 57th birthday on our first ever tramp - also the Milford Track. Since then have tramped many of the great walks and some backcountry tracks up to the last one, the Hollyford, where I turned 65 at Martin's Bay Hut this year, 2010. Knees are hurting now, plus have come to regard my 16/18kg pack with a great deal of suspicion. However, you can't beat NZ for tramping, the best country in the world to do it. I have only tramped in the South island at this stage.

I grew up in the concrete jungle of South London, so tramping wans't on the agenda unfortunately, but discovered the freedom of walking by hitch-hiking through Europe at 15 years old. Fell in love with the Pyrenees and the French Alps soon after and finally found that Scotland had some of the most beautiful country imaginable. Been wandering ever since. Now living in the flatest continent on the planet.........go figure! Thank heavens for NZ.......!

Growing up in Rotorua with all its easily accesible bush and mountains and the fact im a tree hugger it was fairly logical that tramping would become a passion of mine.The first few school tramps into the Ureweras though werent that easy and initially i thought what the hell am i doing here but eventually the pros far outway the cons.These days i go stircrazy if i cant go bush every month or so.

Around 1965 I became interested in Citizens Band Radio. We were always pushing the limits to increase the range of communication. Living in Wellington we looked for a suitable high point to see if it was possible to communicate from one end of the country to the other. The Mitre in the Tararua's became the goal. It was one hell trip with all the gear we took. Yet I still became hooked on getting out and about in the backblocks and bush. For a good ten years I traipsed around the country at every opportunity. Then work, marriage, children etc interrupted for many years. Now live and operate a business in Auckland and I discover it has been 36 years since I was last in the Tararuas, a place that is special for me and in which I spent many long hours. Guess I will have to plan for a special nostalgic trip back.

My dad wouldn't take me on tramps though he took my 3 older brothers. Before the boys were big enough he took my 2 sisters aged 6 and 7 from Doubtful Sound to Dusky Sound. However with the boys being big enough, I was never allowed a look-in as he said being a girl I was too weak! This gave me a tremendous motivation to want to go tramping and a dislike of gender-excluding tramping terms e.g 2 man tent. I finally got to go tramping when I was 16 in our all-girls school tramping club that included Norm Hardie who saw I was keen and was very encouraging (he was on the team that did the first ascent of Kachenjunga). All 6 of us siblings tramp but I am the keenest, I'd say.