A Dangerous Business

Dates: 8th-9th December 2023

Typically if I make a post that covers multiple days, it means I’ve taken a rest day somewhere. In a way I guess that’s accurate for these two days, but I haven’t taken a typical zero.

This is going to take a bit of an explanation. At the end of Day 39 I rested in Waitomo. If anyone doesn’t know what Waitomo is famous for, it has some pretty sweet caves and is one of New Zealand’s biggest tourist attractions. The cheapest and easiest cave to access is one filled with glowworms. I’ve toured the caves before with my family in 2015, but Sonja wanted to see them and I figured there wasn’t any harm in going there again. Vicki gets a bit claustrophobic so she opted to wait at the holiday park with our bags. It was a nice tour, nothing I hadn’t seen before but still nice to do. We met up with Jazz Hands at the holiday park when we returned who had spent the morning doing some black water rafting, as had Lupi and Destroyer. It’s a much more intense but memorable tour which sadly was sold out when I checked the day before.

By this time it was 1pm. Having such a slow start to the day felt really weird, even feeling a bit guilty that I wasn’t walking. There was only 15 km to Te Kuiti over a farm trail, but the notes in Far Out did not describe the track in a very positive light. Not dangerous, but not that fun either. So, the three of us decided to try and hitch there instead. That… didn’t work. Turns out hitching is pretty difficult when in touristy towns. We retreated to the general store for lunch to come up with a different plan of attack. I made a post in the TA trail angel Facebook page asking if there were any locals that could give us a lift to Te Kuiti. To my surprise, there was! Amy, a Waitomo local, picked us up and dropped us off at Steve’s place on the northern end of Te Kuiti.

For six years now, Steve has opened up his place for TA hikers stay at, providing space to pitch a tent or offering a room to stay in instead. Like every trail angel I’ve come across, he’s incredibly hospitable and made us feel right at home. We had a nice, peaceful evening, the highlight having to be when Anne and Maud made ratatouille and offered some to us.

Right, let’s talk about the next section. The official trail runs out of town along the Mangaokewa Stream, stopping overnight in Mangaokewa before continuing onto Pureora – the start of the Timber Trail – the next day. The trail notes suggest nothing wrong with this track, however reports on Facebook and Far Out suggest a very different story.

I found parts of this track not very ok… one of the more sketchy sections so far on the TA

bertiebryant

Lost my footing sidling round a steep section of track above the river where the track had fallen away. Suddenly found myself falling down a 30m near vertical cliff towards the river below… Would only recommend it to EFIs with a death wish!

Tom Palfi

There have been several sections that I’ve come to on this trail where I have been afraid to tackle it, but on none of them did I ever feel like my life was in danger. From the sounds of it, the upcoming trail is both poorly maintained and covered in slips and washouts. For all these reasons, I do not feel safe attempting this trail – nor do the vast majority of hikers I’m currently with – so I will be getting a shuttle directly to the start of the Timber Trail. I know Te Araroa is supposed to be a challenge and will be extremely difficult at times, but it is not worth losing my life over.

So, what does my schedule look like going forward? I’m currently in Te Kuiti taking a typical zero day. Tomorrow, a shuttle will pick us up in the morning and take us to Pureora (thanks to Vicki). One thing I’ve forgotten to mention about the Timber Trail is that it’s a cycle trail first and foremost. So, we’re going to cycle it. A cycle hire company will meet us at Pureora (again, thanks Vicki, she’s a bigger planner than me believe it or not), give us our bikes and gear, and take our packs to their campsite halfway along the trail. We’ll stay there overnight in our own tents and then next day we’ll complete the trail.

What’s there to do in the meantime? Not a great deal, the main highlights of my rest day in Te Kuiti were resupplying at New World and a quick round of plastic throwing at a local park.

Oh, another thing. Before I left I had received a verbal offer for a position as a Graduate Mechnical Engineer back in Brisbane. I was hoping to have received the proper offer before I left, alas this was not the case. At long last, I got an email a couple days ago with this offer. I will have a job to come back to when I finish the trail, a new and different kind of adventure. I know that with it comes a lot of new restrictions on how I get to spend my time, but I’m excited for what it holds for me and I’m glad that they’re happy for me to finish walking first before I start working for them.

When I came back from the park, Mirjam and Jacques from France had shown up from Waitomo, making camp just a bit busier. Ron also arrived a bit later. I’m starting to get a bit restless, wanting to get back on trail and get further south, knowing that I’ll be doing some big distances on the bike over the next couple of days.

As you could expect, there’s gonna be a big discrepancy between the distance marker reached at the end of each day and the recorded total distance completed. I won’t be counting the trail from Waitomo to Pureora as being “completed”, it was deliberately skipped. I mentioned this in a previous post, but my intentions of walking every single inch of the trail died once I stepped foot on Ninety Mile Beach. I’m still doing a through-hike, it’s just taking a different form than I anticipated.