Peter Camino

Time to say goodbye to my little house. More than ten months has gone by since I decided to walk the Camino de Santiago. The wait to get started has become agonising over the past few weeks, but now there's only two days to go - I'm packed and ready. On Monday I fly to Auckland and then to Singapore, arriving at 9pm local time for a two-day stopover. Wednesday night I'm off to Frankfurt for another two days, flying to Toulouse on Saturday June 1 and getting a train to St Jean Pied de Port. I start walking the next day (Sunday), with a 28km stretch, including a climb to 1500m - possibly the hardest day of the 42 days I'll spend on the walk. I've done quite a lot of reading and Googling and it seems there'll be three aspects to the adventure. Firstly, the physical act of walking more than 20km every day. I'm not too worried about that. I've done a lot of walking over the summer and I'm taking the soft option of having my bag transported every...

  Looking towards the top of the lake. On Friday I visited my brother Neil and his bride-to-be Jessie in Blenheim, to be briefed on my onerous duties as best man when they get married on May 18. On Saturday, I drove on to St Arnaud and walked up the east side of Lake Rotoiti to the Lake Head hut - a distance of just over 10km. My normal walking pace of about 4.5km an hour was reduced to about 3km due to the vagaries of the surface, so it took a little over three hours. It's noticeable that with age a reduced ability to focus means that it's harder to see exactly where your feet are being placed on tracky ground and there's also a reduced ability to step up and down on uneven and steep ground. In other words, you can't bound ahead like a mountain goat, but have to creep over tricky sections like an oversized caterpillar.   Lakehead Hut. I got to the hut about 3pm and had it all to myself. The sun went down behind the mountains at 3.30pm and as there were no lig...