2 YEARS

Only minutes before, Annie the dog had tried to force her way back into my sleeping bag after sneaking out for a call of nature and her sharp claws had ripped a hole in my poofter pad. I was gutted – my expensive mattress was history!

That got me up and about, piling on warm clothes and boots before sparking the gas cooker into life. Eventually the hissing steam from the billy woke the Gotman from his slumber and I poured hot coffee into our mugs for our first fix of the day.

The new dawn spread light to the east in the dripping forest as we organized ourselves for the day ahead. This primarily involved a 100 yard walk through the bush before we broke out into the sparse tussocks and got to a rock buttress where we could watch over a steep gully system just as we’d