Days 72-77: Back To Walking

We're finally back to what we came here to do: walking. We spent about a week walking from Whanganui to Levin, the last resupply point before the Tararuas. Most people are not very excited about this stretch of trail - there's a lot of road, and much of it is not particularly scenic. However, the entire stretch stays pretty close to civilization, and the terrain is not very challenging, so it was a great section to use to get back in shape and go easy on Liz's foot.

Just out of Whanganui, we hitched past a 19km walk down State Highway 3, which is a pretty busy road. We had avoided "cheating" like this prior to the injury break. However, the seal is broken - we plan to fill in some of the 500km that we missed, but we probably won't have time to go back and walk every single kilometer of the trail. So, given a choice between dodging trucks for 4 hours and sticking out our thumbs for an easy hitch, we chose the latter.

On day 72, after the hitch, we walked down Turakina Beach, an incredibly windy black sand beach that was littered with an unbelievable amount of driftwood. It was surreal. We camped that night in a nice pine forest past the beach, but had a little scare when a pinecone fell on our tent as we were falling asleep. We spent a while after that wondering if a big branch was going to follow, but we made it through the rest of the night without incident.

So windy! You can see the sand blowing everywhere

Interesting piece of driftwood #1: Raptor claw

Artfully canted beach picture, or camera being blown around by the wind?

There were whole trees washed up on the beach

Interesting piece of driftwood #2: Person yelling "You shall not pass!"?

Pretty pine forest that launches deadly pinecone salvos at your tent

On day 73, we walked through Bulls. Bulls is a town with a pretty good sense of humor, and they have wholeheartedly embraced -bull puns. Incredibull, Responsibull, and our favorite, Constabull. Definitely entertaining. We camped that night in a nice spot right next to the Rangitikei River.

Many mailboxes here are interesting, but the chainsaw was a highlight

Next door to the chainsaw... interesting mailbox rivalry?

www.unforgetabull.co.nz

The const-a-bull, complete with police-bull mural

After the sun went down, some weather started rolling in, and the wind changed. Our tent has been pretty good at keeping us dry, but it's Achille's heel is that it needs to be pitched parallel to the wind to stand up well to wind & rain. So we spent a miserable night with the wind & rain blowing in from the side and getting just about everything in the tent wet, except for our sleeping bag (luckily). In retrospect we should have just bitten the bullet and repitched it when the rain started, but at that point we were warm and dry, and didn't want to go out and get wet. Lesson learned, I guess.

We slept in the next morning, and gave everything some time to dry out, before heading on to Feilding (yes, F-e-i - it's named after a person, rather than a grassy area). We had a really tough morning on the heels of our long night. The trail spent a kilometer or two squeezing between a cliff over the river and an electric cow fence. The wind was also gusting, luckily (?) pushing us into the fence rather than off the cliff.

As the trail cut over towards the road, we also had to cross the electric fence a couple of times. Normally, land owners provide nice stiles (steps) over their fences, and cover the section you have to cross in rubber tubing to avoid zaps. Not this landowner though. There was virtually no help in getting over, and his phasers... er, fences were set to something higher than stun. We both zapped ourselves pretty well at different points, and they were definitely the strongest jolts we've encountered yet. To top it all off, the wind kept getting stronger, and we had an hour or so of horizontal rain as we came out to the road. Remind me again why we were so eager to get back on the trail?

Things improved from here though. The wind kept up, but was mostly at our backs, and the rain was blown out by early afternoon. We arrived in Feilding, and started looking for a place to set up our tent. We found a promising site when we walked by a field with literally hundreds of other tents set up. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a scout jamboree with total lockdown security. There was no hope of talking the awkward Canadian security guard into letting us plop our tent down anywhere inside the miles of fences surrounding the outdoor convention. Luckily, we made friends with a nice family that lived in the middle of the park, and they let us camp in their backyard.

A surreptitious photo of the jamboree. Luckily the security guard didn't
see me take this, otherwise he might have confiscated our camera

Day 74 brought us into Palmerston North, where we camped in Jenny and Hayden's backyard (Jenny is James's sister, and Hayden, her husband, was on the river trip with us). They have two amazingly cute kids and a zealously friendly dog, so it was a lot of fun spending a little bit of time there.

Picturesque grassy field on the way to Palmy

Genius. Why don't we have this in the US?
The "Vacuum and Fragrance" garage in the background must be a favorite spot for dogs

Day 75 brought us a little bit away from civilization, but was still basically all road walking. We did find a nice campsite in a park off of Kakuterawa Road though.

We were excited to actually spend time walking in trees again

Day 76 was a little more interesting, and we got back into some real forest. With mud. Lots of mud. Part of the day's trail was named after Jim Burtton, who created the route almost 100 years ago. We passed the site where one of his swingbridges collapsed, sending him into the river 12 meters below and breaking both his legs. After this, he apparently crawled home, fed his dogs, then crawled for 12 hours to reach his nearest neighbors. They brought him to a hospital, where he later died from his injuries. Now the trail just fords the stream. Also, there was some mud.

Cool pine forest with ferns lining the track

Nerd joke alert: Debugging the tent before going to bed is a daily chore

That night, we had a hard time finding a campsite. The trail notes mentioned a carpark (American translation: parking lot), which we expected would have some flat grassy areas. It turned out to be a wide spot in the gravel road. We found, quite likely, our worst campsite ever a few hundred meters away, just off the road at a sharp bend. It was flat though, so we set up our tent and went to bed. We hadn't seen any cars on the road, so figured we wouldn't be bothered overnight.

Despite all the mud, there were some very nice spots 

A lovely spot to camp... can you tell we were a bit desperate?

Then, around 2am, I woke up with headlights coming directly at our tent, and for several eternal seconds was utterly convinced that we had, for some reason, decided to set our tent up in the middle of the road, and were about to be run over. Liz says I yelled something (I don't remember yelling, I was still half asleep), which freaked her out, and she let out an amazing, movie worthy blood curdling scream. Then the car continued around the bend in the road, and was gone, and we realized that we were not about to die. I think I experienced the same feeling that sleeping people on crashing airplanes feel when they first wake up. Except we didn't die, which makes it a little bit better, I guess. Needless to say, it was a while until we fell back to sleep.

Day 77 was pretty similar to day 76 - mud - with about 50 stream crossings thrown in for extra fun. It wasn't long before we got fed up with rock hopping every 25 meters and just got our shoes wet. On the bright side, the stream washed most of the mud off.

The Horowhenua Lookout. When we first arrived, we couldn't see anything,
but luckily the clouds cleared up a bit while we ate lunch

By this point we had mostly forgotten the horizontal rain and
electric shocks, and were happy to be in the wilderness again

At the end of the day, we reached a road that we had been planning to use to hitchhike into the town of Levin to resupply before the Tararuas. We had stopped at a side trail that also led into town, and were debating between 7kms of trail walking that was sure to get us to town that night, or sticking with the deserted road in hopes of getting a ride, when we ran into John coming by on his mountain bike. He said "well, you could go into town... or you could just come stay at my place 200 meters down the road. Your choice."

We made the correct decision, and stopped at his place, which turned out to be the Makahika Outdoor Pursuits Centre. They do a range of things there, from the mandatory outdoor education courses for kids, to rehab trips into the wilderness for troubled youths. It was a gorgeous piece of land, with a 40 bed bunkhouse, including showers and laundry, that we had all to ourselves for the night. On top of that, they fed us a delicious dinner and breakfast, and then John drove us into town to shop the next morning before dropping us off at the trailhead for the Taruaruas. They say they love hosting TA walkers, so if you're going by, make sure to stop here! Beware though, it will be hard to resist the temptation to stay for multiple days, or to just abandon your trip altogether and work for Sally as an instructor.

The "American" shelves in the international aisle in the grocery store.
Pop Tarts, Golden Grahams, A&W root beer... an odd selection to say the least

John & Sally's was a perfect place to recharge a little before heading into what will likely be the hardest, but most beautiful section of the trail so far. Liz's foot is feeling good - not 100% healed, but not holding her back. In fact, I heard way more complaints about being generally out of shape and sore than I heard about that pesky third metatarsal. So we're cautiously hopeful that the foot injury is a thing of the past, and I can stop talking about it altogether at this point!