Nails Pinnacles Sudden Death

This past weekend a bunch of good folk went camping down near Cape Palliser, on the south coast of the North Island. The weather had been horrid lately but we chanced a window of clear skies and warmth, and though the wind came in solidly through the night and there was a bit of rain mostly we got out unscathed.
The one-nighter was to celebrate the birthday of Leon (King and God), and many glasses of mead and whisky and such were raised in his honour. The Alligator also introduced all and sundry to his game Nails, which may just be the greatest drinking game of all time, although bunch of elderly lightweights that we are we didn’t quite get as hammered as we could have.
Shortly after arriving we embarked on the easy trek upstream to the Putangirua Pinnacles, a very strange environment indeed where eighty-foot cliffs were made of soft-packed stone constantly eroding; every step was accompanied by the clatter of pebbles falling somewhere, and brushing the walls would cause the outer layer to collapse. It was an invigorating and eerie place, the soft soil’s collapse making a weird rippling landscape of deep channels and odd recesses.
The Pinnacles were used as a location in Lord of the Rings, in the approach to the Paths of the Dead in the third movie; here’s a pic of the location on a LOTR site that gets across the weirdness of the place quite well.
What it’s like among the Pinnacles – pic from theonering.net
(I’ve been trying to find a screencap online showing the landscape as it appears in the film, but no luck.)
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And after returning, shaggy-brained and wind-blown, from the camp I had a couple hours to rest before an Indoor Netball final, which was against our arch-nemesis team – we’d won by a last-second goal in our last match. This time they stormed out to a big lead in the first quarter and we spent the rest of the match creeping back into it, only taking the lead once with a couple minutes to go, and then ending regular time on a draw! So it went to a shootout, which again was a draw, and then a sudden-death shootout which our chosen shooter managed to win! Victory, hard-fought, against a team you really respect – that’s one of the pleasures of sport right there.
Although I think it helped put my back out. Owie.