Days 51-55: Pureora Forest

Back on the trail! Well, sort of, and only temporarily. Liz rested her foot in Te Kuiti with Donna and Brett, while I headed out to hike about 80km through Pureora Forest, ending up in Taumarunui. It was a great forest - possibly the best so far. I was sad that Liz missed it, but happy to have something to do for a few days.

Days 46-50: New Friends And Some Foot Healing

We've spent the last five days in Te Kuiti, staying with Donna and Brett, and making some great new friends! Liz has also had the first real improvement in her foot after some reflexology and visiting the "physio" (NZ for physical therapist).

Days 39-45: Time For Plan B

Well, we are still in Hamilton. We've been off the trail for about 10 days now, and are starting to feel a bit fat and out of shape after suddenly becoming so sedentary for so long. We are really itching to get back on the trail, but unfortunately it looks like we'll probably be taking a few weeks off.

Trail Food

Food is something we spend a lot of time thinking about. Hiking almost every day for a month makes you ravenous. Whenever we hit a grocery store, we buy all sorts of outrageous, heavy, spoilable things to consume immediately. Whole bags of potato chips, quarts of milk, and kilograms of kiwis have disappeared in a blink of an eye. And all without an ounce of guilt - both of us have lost weight on this trip, and need as many calories as we can get.

Days 36-38: Rest and Perspective

We've spent the last 2 days resting at a very nice AirBnB in Frankton (near Hamilton), at the home of a Chinese couple who recently moved here to start a carpentry business. While in Mercer, we decided to skip about 80 km ahead on the trail to rest in Hamilton, which is a larger city with many more options for accommodations and shopping than the smaller towns north of here. We're unhappy about skipping any of the trail, and have vowed to come back and do this section before we leave the country, but it was the best of several bad options.

Days 30-35: A Marathon and a Forest Crawl

Another 5 days down, another 120 km behind us. We're up to kilometer 720, and are approaching the one quarter mark on the trail.

Days 23-29: Back to Where We Started

We've arrived back in Auckland! 600 km down, only 2400 more to go. It only took a few hours on a few buses to get from here to our starting point, but it took us more than 3 weeks to get back on foot. I can confidently say that the foot route is much more interesting though.

Days 20-22: Ocean Beach, Bream Head, Waipu

Wow, what a packed few days we've had! We covered some serious ground and have come 90 kms in 2.5 days (although we didn't actually walk quite that many - read on). We also had some amazing views, a great campsite, and a 60th birthday party! We've come about 425 total kms so far, and have probably about a week to go before we hit Auckland.

Days 14-19: Down the Coast

We arrived in Ngunguru yesterday, and are taking a rest day here at the Riverbank Homestay with amazing hosts Hilton & Melva Ward. They maintain (on a volunteer basis) nearby parts of the trail, and offer free camping to any Te Araroa trampers. After 2 days off in Kerikeri, we've come another 115km, for a total of 335km, and passed two significant waypoints on our way here: 10% (300 km) of the trail completed! and we walked all the way across the country (the easy way - west to east)!

Days 6-11: Forest, Forest, Forest, Road

So, we've finished another 120 kms of the trail, and are now in Kerikeri, a decently sized town near the east coast of NZ. This brings us up to 220 kms total, or 7.3% of the whole trail. This stat is alternately encouraging ("We're almost up to 10% and feels like we just started!") and scary ("220 kms felt like a long way and we've barely made a dent!").

Days 1-5: Ninety Mile Beach, Zero Day in Kaitaia

We've completed the first 100km if the trail!  Only 2900 more to go... 

Visa crisis part 2

Hello from the future! We've crossed the international dateline and are happy to report that Wednesday was lovely. We almost didn't make it though...

We're off!

So we're finally about to leave for New Zealand! Our flight to Auckland leaves tonight at 9pm from San Francisco. We're all packed, wearing the only pair of pants we'll have for the next 5 months, and about to mail our non-hiking gear back to Boston.

Perugia, then halfway across the world

The day after visiting the winery, Liz and I hung out at the villa. We had been vacationing our butts off for quite a few days in a row, and wanted to take advantage of our awesome accommodations and relax a bit. Looking for some nice, light reading, I started War and Peace on my Nook while sitting next to the pool. It's the third time I've tried to tackle it, but the first time I've gotten past the first 100 pages, so I think I might finally finish it.

Antinori Winery

The following day, we visited the Marchesi Antinori Winery. I was expecting something like a typical small US winery - small tasting room, maybe a beautiful hillside, maybe a quick tour past some wine making equipment... well, this place was anything but that. 

Umbria

We've been in San Francisco for a couple of weeks now, and I've been seriously slacking on blog posts. There are so many things to do and people to see in this city that I somehow haven't had time to sit down and capture the rest of our trip in Italy. I'm back to it now though, so here's a quick (ok, not that quick) run down of our first full day in Umbria...

The Villa

For the rest of our stay in Italy, we'll be staying in "The Villa", near Perugia. Tom and Lori, our hosts, are friends of Marianne and Larry. They've always wanted to rent an Italian villa, finally took the plunge this year, and then invited all of their friends and family to stay with them. We were lucky enough to get included in that, and couldn't turn down the offer.

Colosseum, Rome Capital Building, Spanish steps

The main event of our second full day in Rome was a visit to the Colosseum. The scale of it was impressive - large enough that I can't really wrap my head around the level of effort and ingenuity it took to build it without any modern equipment. For me, it's similar to trying to grasp the scale of the universe... logically, I know how big the numbers involved are, but there's really no way to put it in proper perspective.

Vatican, St. Peter's Basilica, Pantheon

We went on a grand tour around Rome today, and saw maybe 2% of all the amazing things here.

It's all about the journey, not the destination, right?

Yesterday, after a whirlwind of final packing, we left Massachusetts for the last time before the trek. The plan was to fly to Italy for a vacation with Liz's family, then off to California for a couple of weddings, then off to New Zealand on October 21 to start the trail.

24 hours after we left, we arrived at our apartment in Rome. The trip was supposed to take about 12 hours.

Life turned upside down

Yesterday, I was gainfully employed, and living in a great condo in Porter Square. Today, I am "homeless" (in the safest possible way), and unemployed. Now I'm on my way to a bachelor party for the weekend, and when I come back, nothing will be the same. In just over 2 weeks, we leave Massachusetts, and won't be back until April.

As one of our friends says to their one year old when she cries: "so many feelings!"

This may surprise some of you, but I do have feelings. And right now, I'm feeling sad to leave behind so many good friends. It kind of feels like we're letting them down, in a way, by cutting ties or putting relationships on hold for 8 months. The amount of love and support that we've gotten from coworkers, friends, and family is amazing and humbling though.

I'm also way more scared than I thought I would be. We have a very comfortable life, and I am worried we will turn around in 2 months and say "what were we thinking???" (and not in a joking way).

At the same time, I'm still more excited than anything else, and sure that our crazy plan to hike the length of New Zealand is going to turn into the adventure of our lives. But it's still hard to say goodbye.

Tracking us on the trail

Here is a map that will be updated just about every day with our location while we're hiking!

https://spotwalla.com/tripViewer.php?id=7a5552165abb6e872

Moved! Sort of...

We "moved" today!  Except, we're still living in our condo, and a lot of our stuff is still here.

Visa crisis!

Visa crisis!

Staying in New Zealand for longer than three months requires a visa, so we went through the process of applying. To apply for a NZ visa, we had to mail a form, along with some passport pictures, proof that we have the means to leave the country when our stay is up, and our passports. Luckily we avoided needing to include chest x-rays to prove that we don't have tuberculosis.

Resupply

One of the common questions we get is about how we'll resupply food and other essentials while we're on the trail. All of our past trips have been short enough that we could prepare everything in advance - from food to sunscreen to batteries - and just mail packages to stops along our route so we could pick them up on the way. That is not going to work on this trip... Pulling together 5 months of supplies in advance is basically impossible.

Gear

Backpacking gear is really awesome. It continually amazes me how light and compact survival gear has become. Super lightweight, durable, waterproof/water resistent fabrics have made shelters, sleeping bags, packs, and clothes incredibly lightweight and compact. Extremely minimalistic backpackers can safely walk into the wilderness for days at a time with less than 10 pounds on their backs, which is slightly more than the weight of a gallon of milk. That doesn't include food or water, but it still boggles my mind.

Nerd alert: scraping TA trail notes from the web

Half of the fun of these long trips is the planning.  I used to think it was bizarre to enjoy the complicated planning and logistics that go into any long trip (hiking or not), but I've since realized that it's just part of my nature as a computer scientist/engineer, and I've embraced it.

One of the things I've been working on lately is gathering the trail notes for the TA into a compact form.  The trust that created and maintains the TA has a fantastic website with a lot of essential information.  One of the most important things available there are the trail notes - essentially, directions for the entire 3,000 km route.  They are available on the web as nicely formatted pages like this one.  They are also available for download in PDF format.

This is great!  Unfortunately, if you print out the PDFs, it ends up being close to 250 pages of notes.  Even if you split that up and only carry the notes for one section of the trail at a time, it's way more paper than we want to carry, and it's not as convenient to reference while we're on the move.

Why are we going?

So why are we going on this trip?

First, it's a big challenge - physically, but more so mentally.  I think Liz and I both want to see if we can actually make it.  There will be low points... the day will come when it's been raining for 5 days straight, we've been eating the same noodles for dinner every day for 2 weeks, and we have 8 more miles of hiking through scratchy bush on a muddy trail before we can set up our tent in the rain and eat a cold dinner.  Can we push through moments like that and accomplish the feat of hiking across an entire country?  If we can, we'll come out the other side with a fantastic sense of accomplishment.

What have we gotten ourselves into?

Ever since we rented our condo, booked plane tickets, and told our jobs we'd be leaving, we've been slowly telling our friends and family about our plan to hike all 3000km of the Te Araroa.  We usually get one of a few different responses, ranging from "Are you nuts?" to "That's awesome!" to "So, like, where will you sleep?  Will you stay at hotels along the way?" And, of course, there are always those unfortunate few who just say "Must be nice" and move on.

Despite the cosmetic differences, the majority of people that we share the news with convey two things to us: they are happy and excited that we're going on a big adventure, and they also have no way to relate to what we'll be doing.  I'm guessing this is because most people don't spend much time out in the wilderness, and can't really imagine what thru-hiking for months on end is really like.  So, I'll try to describe it a bit, at least as I see it.

It's really real

Over the past two weeks, this trip has gone from a decision to a reality. We've rented our condo to a professor from Princeton, whose wife will be doing a postdoc at Harvard. Liz and I have both told our jobs that we'll be leaving in September. Liz was very happy and excited when her job agreed to do their best to take her back when we return in April.

The beginning of it all

So, we've decided to hike the Te Araroa, a 3000km trail that stretches from Cape Reinga at the northern tip of New Zealand, to Bluff, at the southern tip.  How did we get here?  What made us decide to walk away from our lives and into the wilderness for six months?   Sleeping on the ground, getting eaten alive by bugs, carrying everything we need to survive on our backs, and going without showering for days at a time... we've done this for a couple of weeks at a time before, but five or six months?  What are we thinking?