Pete Hitchman teaches survival skills. Photo / Supplied
Pete Hitchman teaches survival skills. Photo / Supplied
As told to Elisabeth Easther
Growing up in Birmingham, there wasn't much wilderness to explore so my friends and I used to play in the scrapyards. We'd borrow the roofs of old cars and use them to raft on local streams and rivers. Family holidays were mainly in North Wales. Mum and Dad had a permanent spot in a caravan park in Porthmadog, right next to the mountain. We were constantly watching the weather, because the higher you are the quicker weather changes. We'd always look at the mountain before we went out, we could see it from the caravan, and if it looked close, bad weather was coming, and if it seemed far away, it was a good day. Mainly we went climbing and fishing. I had my first weird culinary experience there with my father. He's ex-British forces and his way of fattening up maggots before putting them on a fishing hook was to have me hold them under my tongue to warm them up.
At 17, I used to compete for Britain in bodybuilding. I was a heavyweight, so I was a big guy, and I used to work in nightclubs as a bouncer.
Our in-house band was called Duran Duran
and, as they became bigger and bigger, the manager of the club signed them up. I became part of their security team with two former SAS guys. This was 1984 and I toured through the UK and Europe with them. Although, all we ever saw was the inside of limousines, tour buses, concert halls and hotels. We didn't have time for much else, and at 17 you don't think much about sightseeing.
Duran Duran in their 1980s heyday. Photo / Supplied
I later owned a bar and nightclub in Kefalonia, in the Greek Islands.
Because there was no ambulance on the island, if there was an accident you'd have to drive with your lights flashing and the horn going, and everyone knew that was an ambulance
. The locals there would hunt for flocks of small birds. There were so many of them, they made the sky go dark when they flew over. They were also a delicacy. One guy had an old blunderbuss and they'd empty all these shotgun cartridges and fill the bowl with powder. One person would hold the blunderbuss and three others would hold him, then he'd pull the trigger and they'd all fall backwards as the birds came down. The birds were thrown straight on to the fire, cooked whole, then they'd crunch them up, bones and all.
On my way to New Zealand I spent a few months travelling through India. My first port of call was Matheran, a hill station four hours outside Bombay. You can only get there by horse or ox cart and there's no power up there, no cars. I spent a week exploring the plateau and dodging grey monkeys. If the monkeys see you have a carrier bag, one will bark at you from the front like a dog, and the others will sneak behind you and grab the bag. I was at a marketplace when I saw some local kids kicking a small dog. I made them stop, then gave the dog a pack of biscuits, so it started followed me. It ended up guarding my hut, which meant the monkeys couldn't steal from me and from then on, the kids all called me Dog Man.
I've always loved the outdoors
, and when I came to New Zealand I got my Outdoor Leadership Certificate at the Hillary Outdoor Pursuits Centre before starting work at the Christchurch YMCA as a senior outdoor instructor. We took kids kayaking, rock climbing and on ski camps. I especially loved the snow camps. We'd take teenagers up the mountain, spend the night in a snow cave then, the next day, we'd climb the mountain above Broken River Ski Club.
Pete Hitchman, was formerly based in Queenstown. Photo / Supplied
In 2007, my wife and I moved to Queenstown to run New Zealand Walks.
One year we decided to introduce snowshoeing
. We started with five pairs of snowshoes, just to give it a try. That first year we had had five clients the whole season. We didn't do any marketing so no one knew what it was, but then Tourism New Zealand came on board, and Destination Queenstown. We got more shoes and coats, and from five in that first year, two years later we had 1500 people.
We live in Taupō now. I'm operations manager with Chris Jolly Outdoors and we offer things like survival walks, taking people through various scenarios. One important thing we teach is the Rule of Three. For survival, you can go three minutes without oxygen, three hours without adequate shelter, three days without water and three weeks without food. We take groups step-by-step from an urban environment, all the way to surviving in the wild, teaching them things like how to make fire with twigs and the battery from their phone. We're also about to start snowshoeing on Tukino Ski Field. We've done all the health and safety the website's ready to go live and we're in the final stage of getting concession from DoC. With a few big dumps over the next few weeks, we expect to be open for business any day.
Pete Hitchman is Operations Manager for Chris Jolly Outdoors chrisjolly.co.nz
