I admit it. I cheated.
Yup, right at the very beginning, on day five.
I’m attempting to walk the entire length of New Zealand on the Te Araroa, a thru-hike that should take me five months to complete, and I’ve already skipped a section.
But let’s be fair, everyone cheats at least a little on this massive trail, one that’s less an actual trail than an idea, and the part I skipped is all on road.
Does it count if cheating wasn’t my idea? I’m staying with a friend of a friend of a friend, a lovely retired doctor who is beloved up here in the far, far north. Peter’s home overlooks Ahipara Bay, and it was a quiet evening just for two drinking wine under the olive trees, my tent, the alicoop drying on his lush lawn in between rain showers, a pork belly dinner, lots of conversation and finally singing for one another.
He wondered last night if I’d “betray the mission” by having him drive me to the next town because the Te Araroa Trust had to divert the trail onto nearly 28 kilometers – or 17 miles – of hot tarmac, five k of which they suggest – or rather, require – the hiker hitch a ride because it’s all too dangerous.
Other issues have intruded too, like I already need to resupply at the store in the next town, Kaitaia and Irene, my Kiwi friend who brought me from the airport to the start of the trail and with whom I’ve walked with so far, already hitched a ride to town. If I insist up on being resolute in walking this “section” – in big air quotes – I’d likely be walking on my own.
A bit of background here: the route has been diverted because the first of four Northland forests has been closed. The reason is the trees are dying. Kauris are massive conifers with a girth to rival American Sequoias. They’re ancient, dating back to the Jurassic period, with a beautiful, flaky bark that hinders parasitic plants, and massive branches – though tiny leaves – that dominate the forest canopy.
For this dendrologist wannabe tree enthusiast, Kauris are magnificent. So it’s with great sorrow that they are being brought down by a microscopic fungus. Phytophthora agathidicida or Kauri dieback moves through soil from tree to tree, carried on the bottom of a tramper’s shoes. It only takes a pinhead’s worth to spread the fungus, so why take a chance?
The Herekino Forest is closed to all, yet the Raetea Forest is still open and that’s where I’m headed this morning in Peter’s Range Rover. He throws my pack in the boot, then heaves his own pack in after lacing up his boots, planning to join us for at least the first few hours in completely new terrain.
The road is narrow and winding as we head inland, away from the blowing sand on Ninety Mile Beach, and in towards vivid green pastureland, cows lining up on the verge to cross when there’s a break in traffic. Kiwis drive fast and always seem delighted to be out in their beautiful country, Peter shouting over the whine of the SUV to point out a Marae or meeting house of local Maori.
The Ninety Mile Beach felt deserted, remote and lonely, and it’s not an understatement to say I feel culture shock pulling into the massive parking lot of an equally massive box store called Pak’nSav to pick up a few items for the coming days. Peter grabs his own trolley as we synchronize shop, the bulk section of nuts and candy as delightfully decadent as walking into Willy Wonka’s factory.
We settle up and get moving again to pick up Irene at her friend’s house and Peter tells me with a grin that the shop keepers gave him a bit a sideways look wondering who his “young woman friend” is shopping so early in the morning. Ha! Let ‘em talk! Peter lost his wife about a year and a half ago and is just about ready to try dating again. He tells me there’s a kind of “Tinder for People over Seventy” in the community. He’s such a lovely person, they’ll be fightin’ over him.
We find Irene high up on a hill, a cluster of homes nestled in with a few barnyard creatures roaming about and views to the surrounding mountains. I’m so glad we’ll continue together as she tells me that Amelia and Jean-Christophe kept walking on the road after the beach and are now a full day ahead.
We bump and lurch up the Takahue Saddle Road to the Mangamuka Route. The air is cool and fresh, the smell so different now – sweetly pungent, earthy and moist. Peter names the plants as we pass them on what is more a four-wheel drive road than trail, wide enough that we can walk abreast. The light is dappled in a checkered pattern through massive tree ferns, with fiddleheads larger than my fist.
We pass driveways with curious metal gates, decorated with masks, sculptures and keep out signs. It’s easy walking slowly uphill and we talk the entire way before Peter slows down to tell us he’s heading back now. It seems arbitrary to me since it’s still early and the going’s good. But then he points to my left, to a tiny opening in the thick foliage.
That’s the way? In there? It’s a trail about a meter wide. People have been here recently, I see, and have left footprints squished into deep mud already filled with coffee-colored water. They trail off and are lost in the bush, the track no longer a gradually ascending road on long switchbacks, but rather one aggressively cutting up the mountain now; straight up.
Up until this point in the day, my Lekis were pretty much window dressing. The “trail,” if you can call it a trail, was really more of a road, or forest track. What Irene and I were walking on now was the opposite extreme and it gave a whole new meaning to the term “tramping track.”
The mud is thick and sticky, wet and slippery. Roots crisscross the path and I learn quickly not to try and balance on them as a means to avoid the mud, because they’re worse than the mud, greasy and unstable . The bush presses in on us in a fecund jungle, not allowing any side-stepping of the thickest patches. And it’s not just up, but down and back up again, no views at all giving us even the least hint where we are.
The truth is, there’s only one way to get through and that’s to simply plunge directly through it. I know there’s a lesson hidden in this moment, one about persevering and pressing forward, facing obstacles straight on. But at this point, the sun streaming through and a friend bonding over slip-n-slide squishiness with me, I’m having fun.
In the first minutes, I’m muddy up to my knees, the soft muck oozing through my running shoes, the rainwater cooling my feet. And Irene just keeps nattering the whole way, since we dare not split up in this thick maze. She reminds me of Hiker B, my friend Brenda who hiked with me on similarly rough conditions one rainy fall on the Border Route Trail in Northern Minnesota.
We saw practically no one in that wet overgrown wilderness, but saw loads of tracks from resident creatures – moose, bear, wolf – though never having the chance to actually see them, since they could hear us coming from miles away.
This forest, too, is thick with blow down and mud, uphill to Mangamuke Saddle. Slip-n-slide is all fun and games until you’re hauling up a fully re-supplied pack straight up-hill in it. Hiker B often would say she longed for just “a hundred feet of joy.” Here it’s more like a meter here and a meter there, and you never really want to take your eyes off where you’re putting your feet.
My Lekis save me from a muddy bum, and I walk with an animal gait, reaching forward and sort of crawling through. We take one brief look out at a view of bush covered mountains undulating towards the horizon, then back in towards the summit and radio towers, a sign telling us they’re one minute off the trail.
It’s too early to camp, but what a perfect blanket of grass in the sun. It’s tomato soup and Hungarian salami for lunch, neither of us feeling particularly eager to move on. The trail goes up, and down, and up again. I think I already said that, didn’t I? The fun is wearing off a little and it’s getting tiring – and late. Camping by a river, and a chance to rinse is a long way off.
Irene and I are quiet in our thoughts and then she says, “A tui!”
It’s not that I hadn’t noticed the birds until now. There was a pretty steady racket of birds. But I was so focused on the mud, my eyes and ears aimed down, it took Irene’s pointing out this fanciful creature for me to stop and listen.
A tui is a passerine, or perching bird. Their plumage is an oily purple and blue, but from my vantage, this one appeared all black except for the tuft of white at its throat, like a minister, that waddled and throbbed as he would sing. But is sing the correct term? I hear a few bell-like sounds amidst clicks, cackles, creaks, groans and wheezes more like R2D2 than any bird I’d ever heard. I learn later tuis can sound like two birds because of their bifurcated sound-producing organ called a syrinx.
Mine let the silence grow, then sing a song so loud like he’d never heard of using his inside voice. My tui follows us for a few steps before I say goodbye and Irene assures me I’d hear more, and many, like parrots, mimicking precisely voices and sounds, sometimes to the utter annoyance of anyone close by.
The trail plays tricks on me. Blue sky opens up and a summit appears near, but the orange triangles point down, then around. I brought three liters of water to last the day with the intention of making it to a lovely stream just beyond the forest. But the afternoon gives way and the light begins to change, warming to a deep orange the tall Rimu covered in Dr. Seussian epicytes and long, black tendrilly, supplejack.
This has got to be the hardest trail I’ve walked and this is not my first rodeo. Epic mud and I have become personally acquainted in the Peru’s Vilcabamba, Chile’s Torres del Paine and England’s Pennines, but this is all three – on steroids. A turn-you-around-on-trail mass of overgrowth, suck-off-your-shoe mud, obscure-the-tripping-hazards giant ferns you’d ever seen – and most of it on a slope.
It begins to occur to me that we’ve been far too laid back about the day. Lingering over breakfast, strolling through the Pak’nSav, sauntering with Peter up the first part while he identified trees, and finally lounging by the radio towers for a long, leisurely lunch – it’s all left us far behind schedule.
Not that I’m much of a scheduled kind of backpacker, but there is no flat space – let alone clear space – to set our tents. And even though it doesn’t seem that way today, this is a rain forest. We need to be under some sort of shelter. In here is nothing but a wisp of a trail marked by a series of orange triangles hammered to trees. In the dark, there’s no telling where the trail goes.
Later in my hike, I hear of a solo female hiker who got so turned around in here, she kept walking and walking after dark, fell down a waterfall and somehow not only managed to survive the fall, but managed just enough cell service to call for help. I thankfully have my GPS, but under so much tree cover, the reception is spotty.
We go up and up and come to a wide spot in the trail where it appears another trail joins in. A wooden sign points to Makene Road one way and TA SOBO (or southbound) the other with the encouraging words, “Only 2,850 kilometers to go!”
It’s not really flat enough to pitch on all these roots. We both use an oddly named crowd-sourced trail app on our phones called “Guthook,” one that most thru-hikers use instead of paper maps, something practically useless in this clag.
An entry from a recent hiker tells us there is a spot to camp just below the summit. Is this the summit? I wonder.
The description is even more vague. “A grassy area with some flat spots for a tent or two between kilometer mark 148 and 150.” Considering we’ve been averaging one kilometer per hour, that’s some spread.
We press on, knowing we’ll have to spend the night in this forest and no matter what, it’s got to be that grassy area. But as we pass what we think might be the summit, the trail comes to a dead end of blowdown in a tangled mass. We climb over hugging a steep ridge until the trail completely peters out. “This doesn’t feel right.” Irene says, checking her app to see if there’s any indication of the right way. “Let’s go back to that blowdown and just see.”
Best idea of the day because just beyond the blowdown, hidden by branches and ferns fanning out is an orange triangle pointing down. What we were walking on is called a herd trail. Everyone made the same mistake, and you get enough people walking that way, the wrong way begins to look like the right way.
So we broke out of the pack and head down, where instantly the real trail becomes more obvious. “We’re going down!” I tell Irene who gives me a “No shit!” look. Down doesn’t take your breath away, but it’s slippery and hard to negotiate. On and on we go, down and down, over roots and through mud as the sun begins to disappear and the air cools.
What about this day, I think. What has it taught me? To just plow through the tough stuff and not care if you get dirty. To never assume and to look and listen for all the beauty around you, even if you’re tired and uncertain you’ll find a flat place to camp.
That’s the wonder of hiking, that you really, truly have to let go – of expectations, of being hard on yourself, of having to do things in the right way because sometimes the day just gets away from you and you have to improvise.
I’m tired and ready to stop. Just as I think that I notice there’s grass under my feet. The trail widens slightly into a small flat area, no bigger than the width of a tent.
“We’re here!” No water, no view, nothing to write home about, but it is perfect for our two single tents set one after another, nearly blocking the trail. The alicoop is up fast and I set about peeling off my muddy clothes and using every disposal wipe in my arsenal to clean off the mud so I can crawl inside.
Dinner is a luxury, though quick as Irene and I share her rain cape as a seat. Just then, two hikers crash out of the bush, their headlamps lighting up the gloaming. Rowan and Rebecca arrive, newlyweds who thought hiking nearly 2,000 miles might be a good way to start a marriage. They charm us with their English accents and understated style, too restrained to ever admit they thought they’d never get out of the forest tonight.
Tuis and birds exotic to my ears pipe up as we all begin to settle in for the night. Rowan chatters on with energy and self-assuredness of a man on his honeymoon. He brags about the number of sweets they carry and how many they eat per day, which instantly makes me feel better since thru-hiking brings out the “candy grabber” in me.
And before long, the night goes pitch black and we all fall asleep to a jumbled melody of Raetea Forest’s wild lullaby.
Until next week when we’ll push through more forest to the Bay of Islands, happy trails!