Watching the sunrise from The Pinnacles summit is the closest I’ve come to waking up on a mountain. We got lucky with the weather - even though we went to sleep with overcast skies, by the time we started walking to the summit just before 5am, the Milky Way was there in all its glory, daring us to turn off our headlamps.

Our hike to The Pinnacles started the day before, having met up with Kuya Rommel (my cousin) and his friend Ian at the Kauaeranga Valley Information Centre car park.

Turns out the track car park was another fifteen minutes away, and my poor Betty (my Rav 4) was to get an even thicker coating of the dusty gravel road. The car park was pretty much full by the time we got there, and I ended up parking on the side of the road a couple of minutes away.

It was already midday by the time we started hiking towards The Pinnacles hut. There was no rush really, the hut was three hours away and with daylight savings, we had plenty of light left. I was already sweating even before we started hiking - the temperature was in the mid-twenties but felt hotter because of the humidity.