Trampers Anonymous

Signs of addiction:

* You make your breakfast with powdered milk, even when you aren’t in the mountains.

* You take detours through parks in the city on a walk to Uni, pretending that they are wilderness areas and you secretly pretend that the band rotunda in the domain and the small museum in Albert park are ‘huts.’

* You develop the capacity to sleep anywhere, in caves, on sofas, floors.

* You wear your tramping socks to Uni.

* You compulsively decorate your bedroom and flat with maps and pictures of mountains.

* The folks at Bivouac know you by name and have a personal account for you.

* When quizzed you can recite the name of every of the 999 huts in NZ, by name and in alphabetical order.

* When quizzed you have stayed in all of the 999 huts in NZ, you have also stayed in all of the bivouacs and rock shelters.

* When someone asks you how long your latest trip was, you reply with the amount of weeks or months.

* You bring scroggin with you to Uni.

* When you go on a date with a potential love interest, you take him/her on a rugged epic in the Ruahines, if they prove unable to sustain the pace, the romance is off.

* When you gaze over a map, instead of seeing the words ‘impassable gorge’ you see ‘exciting trip’.

* You frenziedly save up before the holidays, so you can afford several helicopter food drops during your month long epic in Fiordland.

* You start using a machete that you found in the Ureweras to create your own tracks.

* You look forward excitedly to the event of the bird flu getting to NZ, so you have a legitimate reason to live in the Ureweras.