23rd June - Central: Mangakino to Okahune
Heading south I was aiming for different roads than before, so I headed down from Mangakino around the west side of lake Taupo. There is a reason the East is the tourist drive! The west is a reasonably nice winding road through the farmland, but there's almost no lake views (I think because of the terrain not the weather, although the lake view I did get is mostly cloud!) I passed another nice power station lake up at Whakamaru, the entrance to a few hikes that would probably be nice on a dry day but otherwise not much.
Further south it was back into National Park territory, but with the clouds still hanging low Ruapehu and Tongariro were virtually invisible. The rain was only getting worse, so I pretty much stuck to the driving down the west side of the park to an overnight camp at Raetihi where I took advantage of the indoors to hone my jigsaw skills (and avoid another night hanging out in the car!). The next morning was not exactly gloriously sunny, but the rain was spitting rather than pouring so I headed up the Okahune mountain road to the Turoa ski field. It's still closed due to lack of snow but there were a couple of waterfalls on the way up, one of which had a starring role in Lord of the rings (Gollum caught a fish there) and they were very pretty. The views would probably be fantastic on a clear day, but I mostly got cloud and rain then back into Okahune to stock up for the Whanganui river road.
22nd June - Central: Ngatea to Mangakino
So much for seeing places without the rain! It started coming down in earnest only a little while after I left camp, varying from torrential to spitting but never actually stopping outright. I visited Karangahake gorge, which looked super beautiful and had lots of interesting walks around old railway lines and mining tunnels that I couldn't do because of the rain. Then I headed up mount te aroha and got a nice view from halfway up but couldn't hike to the top because of the rain.
By the time I go to the Wairere falls I was desperate for a break from the car! You couldn't see them from the road so I thought I'd break out my stylish poncho as soon as the rain lessened and see how quickly I could do the 45min walk up to the lookout. Result: sadly not that quickly, since the path had turned into a stream and the walk was mostly done jumping from one rock to another. My poncho was great for heads and upper halves, but my knees down got soaking wet. I'm glad I saw it, the waterfall is the tallest on the North island and is pretty incredible, but I didn't bother trying the climb to the top and I didn't particularly enjoy being soaked so perhaps next time I'll wait for a sunny day.
Further south, the rain stopped long enough for a ten minute walk to the blue pools, a beautifully clear river where the water is tinted blue (possibly it's very blue on a clear day). Then I was planning to drive south on the highway but a police diversion led me to pick another route along the Waikato river. Way back when, Hasan and I drove along this river looking for the mythical 'Waikato river trails'. Today I found them! But the shortest one was a solid 11km and the sky was still threatening. I did a short walk to check out a swing bridge over a gorge, very impressive if a bit nerve wracking worrying about phones falling out of pockets on the walk across! The road wound along the river, past various lakes all man made running a power generation system that starts with lake Taupo and runs through nine more dam lake power stations on the way to the sea. My camp for the night was another one at mangakino, very picturesque and not too many people.
Te Kauwhata to Auckland Although I could have headed on up the motorway, I decided to do some exploring. Just south of Te Kauwhata was a place called Rangiriri where a historic battle was fought between the Maori and the Europeans during the land wars. They have a cemetery there to remember it, although all the graves are for the Europeans who were killed. I think the Maori remains have been moved to a significant site elsewhere. Across the highway, I visited lake Whangape which was an amazingly still, untouched lake with only one public access point for boats, and the water quality is too low to swim in. There was a couple there in a tardis motorhome who were super friendly and we got chatting about NZ, and then their daughter who's in England 'near some town called Stratford' ;) maybe we're neighbours! Heading up north vaguely parallel to the highway I visited Vivian Falls, a little off the beaten track but marked on my road tripper app by other travellers. I wasn't sure about the winding farm roads to get there, but then it was only a two minute walk from the car park and it was a super pretty waterfall, with loads of great rocks for scrambling and a sign dedicated to the Maori history of the area, where a young man had used the falls to train his men before going off to fight the big cannibal leader of the main tribe. I did make the sensible decision to remove a few items of clothing before scrambling on the rocks, but then balanced this by making the less sensible decision to try and climb under the waterfall and getting all the clothes I'd kept soaking wet. This would have been less of a problem if my jeans and leggings hadn't gone in the sea the day before, so I ended up driving to Auckland in my last pair of dry trousers. I thought I'd head straight to the house to dry off, but then the sun came out all of a sudden with blue skies and warmth coming through the windscreen and I thought I had to take advantage! I checked my route up and found the Auckland botanic garden just off the main highway. On the scale of botanic gardens, it's pretty high! A huge area, with a whole section set aside for native bush and then a series of different gardens including roses, winter flowers, South African plants and a big emphasis on education and children. A really nice place to spend an afternoon, although I'll admit I didn't spend much time in the native bush section - when you've been hiking in it for a month you sort of lose the novelty! :)
(Once again apologising for the long gap. Again, posts will be dated back to the actual time they happened. Life has been throwing twists and turns again, but a quick summary is I’m back in Auckland now, working full time. More details to come, but for now I’m going to try and catch up on the adventures that slotted in between now and the last posts!)
18th/19th June - Crew Trip to Great Barrier Island
The trip was awesome! Totally worth driving all the way back up for, it was great just to see everyone again and to get to hang out. We had about 38 people on board in the end, including partners and babies. Everyone got cabins (luxury!) and I definitely took advantage of the constant hot shower access (so many showers). To start with we took the boat out and started motoring off towards Great Barrier. It's about four hours from Auckland on the Ipipiri, with some amazing views going past Rangitoto and Waiheke then up the harbour with the whole coromandel peninsula spread out alongside. We had clear blue skies and sunshine for long stretches, and we were sitting up the saloon to watch the world go by and hunt for whales and dolphins. Naturally, it was the middle of lunch when we found them, but it was worth the food going cold! A pod of over a hundred common Dolphins came up to check out the boat, jumping in our bow waves and around our wake. We reckon they were chasing fish, there were plenty of birds overhead looking for their share, but they weren't in any hurry and were very happy to come out on a show and play with us.
Then it was up to the island! Great Barrier is a pretty big island, there's a small airport and a ferry runs out there occasionally (although it's a long trip). A lot of native bush and DOC campsites, it's also adjacent to Little Barrier Island which is a completely isolated nature reserve - the shoreline is all tall cliffs except for one very small shingle beach where the DOC occasionally risk mooring their boats, so there's no way for predators to get there. We dropped anchor near a bay on great barrier and a few of us took the tender across to a beach area that's been built into a way station for boat travelling long distances around. There's a little bathhouse with a firewood powered water heater, a set of old school water squeezers, toilets and even a bookshelf like hostels have, where you can swap books around. We did a bit of a walk inland up the hills to check out the views, hindered a little by half of us not having shoes, then headed back to the beach for a paddle before tendering back to the boat for sea biscuiting!
What is sea biscuiting? It's when you inflate a giant circular disk (biscuit) and tie it into your motorboat than drag it along behind until you fall off! I went on with Chloe and we fell off many times, but it was awesome fun. She was mostly better at balancing than me, except for the moment when she started slipping off and decided the solution was to grab the back of my life jacket so I was pulled off too!
24/25th June Whanganui River Road to Whanganui
The Whanganui river is one of the nine great journeys of NZ! Typically started off the forgotten world highway and travelled via canoe, the bottom 64km can also be done as a road trip if you like narrow roads and tight bends (but it is a sealed road!). I figured it would be more exciting than the highway, and it certainly proved me right. A beautiful winding drive along the wall of a gorge stretching the length of the river. A mix of native bush and pine trees, very little cleared areas and farmland (although a lot of farms, not sure what they're doing with them!). It's largely a DOC national park, but also ancestral land for the local Maori tribes so again there's a number of maraes on the route.
The first adventure came only a few km onto the road where there was a big mud slips. Slips are a pretty common fact of life driving in NZ, particularly with the weather being on and off so much lately. I've been stuck at stop signs waiting for diggers to clear them, more often forced into single lane passages to get around them. This is the first time I've had to help clear one! Luckily my timing was pretty good, I arrived after most of the heavy digging had been done and there was a track through. Unluckily the campervan right in front of me veered a little too far to the side and got stuck. With one local, one camper and two other tourists going the opposite way, we had a bit of a mission to get it out. I had a nice conversation with the van driver, who is from Wanaka in the South Island and came up here for the kiwi picking season, while we waited for the local man to drive home and pick up tow ropes, and then as soon as he'd come back and got everything tied up to his (small, old, not-4x4) car, a massive ute came barreling down from the other side, barely even pausing before the owner jumped out and grabbed his own tow cable.
This must be a fairly common occurrence, I saw plenty of other cleared slips on the drive around. I decided not to chance my driving to get Piri through the mud, but the local guy had her through no hesitation. At least it was a beautiful spot to be stuck for an hour!
Highlights of the drive were an old flour mill, all still left standing as it was and free to access, and the marae at Koriniti which has two meeting houses, both elaborately carved. There's a sign up the top of the road saying visitors are welcome to enter (this is rare for maraes, generally you have to be invited and go through a ceremony) but since it was late and winter there was no one around to let me in! :) it was nice to look at anyway! Further on, I did half of a walk up to a viewpoint before being stopped by the mud and then finding a perfectly good viewpoint on the road :)
Back on the highway, I headed directly for Whanganui which appears to be NZ's big art-focused town, lots of galleries and public sculptures. Although it was Sunday so not everything was open, I explored a few galleries and watched a man working in a glass blowing workshop with lots of heating and rolling and stretching of coloured glass.
21st June - Auckland to Ngatea
The night after the big crew trip I was crashing back in Ket's car port. I'd had a small engine issue that Jono had fixed at the boat, but I wanted to run the car a bit to check that it wasn't going to stop working again as soon as I left the city (and drove away from anyone who could help me fix it again) so the two of us went for a trip up to the Waitakere ranges. Previously I'd driven through them on both my trips to Piha and stopped at different waterfalls each time, this time I didn't need to go as far as Piha, so we picked the closest waterfall and just headed up there instead.
Fairy falls was really nice. Maybe a half hour walk from the main road, but then we easily spent another half hour at it. There's four or five different plunge pools as the waterfall drops down through the trees, and after the last one the river gets shallow enough that you can wade down it even further to explore through the bush. This isn't advised in skinny jeans, but luckily if you have a jumper you can retool it into a stylish skirt to save trying to roll your jeans up. So I finally got photographic evidence to back up all my claims of climbing the waterfalls I visit (I really did climb this one! Look! Proof!) a beautiful spot to swim in summer, we still managed to get soaking wet deciding that the best route down was on the other side of the waterfall therefore the only option was to walk through it. (Yay, logic!)
The next day I started heading south again, I'd picked out a new route that went via roads I hadn't visited before, and then very quickly diverted from it onto a road I had. The logic here? Well it was a glorious sunny day and the last time I visited the Wairoa Reservoir it was raining too much to see anything. This time I managed to walk up to the top of the dam, see the sheep grazing down one side of it, and then hike through the hills to get some views out over the lake and round through the bush back to a swing bridge over the river. Definitely nicer with no rain!
I'd stayed at the camp site in Ngatea once before as well, but this time I took advantage of the dry to explore the town a little more, and found a little community vegetable garden to restock my herb supplies.
What’s that? A large group of my favourite people chilling on a boat? Do you think we could have a... party? :D
Back on the boat, after a hot shower (woo!) we had a BBQ dinner and hit the bar. It was an awesome night, balloons and music and a piñata that you couldn't break open with foam swords, although that didn't stop us trying.
It was a slow morning after, with some moaning and groaning as everyone steadily emerged. A couple of us found the courage to jump off the side of the boat and into the water (which felt a lot colder than the day before!) which wasn't entirely pleasant, but definitely cured the hangover! Then we had to take the tender across to the small town (generous name for a couple of houses and a shop!) to drop off Lucky who was flying back to England that very day. Since the boat wasn't guaranteed to get back in time, Lucky caught a plane from the island to the airport! We were given strict instructions to drop her off quickly and go right back to the boat to head home, but she offered to buy us all ice cream so naturally we went with her up to the shop instead and hung around for a proper goodbye :)
Fortunately no one back on the Ipipiri seemed to mind and after we got back and all the fishing gear was put away we headed home. Taking a similar route back, I hung out in the bridge with Richard and baby Kesia to watch the world drift by until all too soon we were back in Auckland again.
The Tongariro national park is a large mountainous region about 6hrs south of Auckland (as the bus drives) and contains what is advertised as the best one day walk in New Zealand, if not one of the best in the world. For the majority of the year the top of it is covered in snow, as it goes over the saddle between two fairly famous mountains. Mountain one is the Tongariro mountain, of which the whole park is named after. Mountain two is mount Ngauruhoe which is best known for being the location filming area for mount doom in Lord of the rings! It is an active volcano and one does not simply walk up to it, you have to catch an earlier bus and then scramble to the top.
I have wanted to do it for a while! Pretty much since the start of summer when the best walking season started, and then as the days ticked by it got more urgent because I really wanted to do it before the snow came back. I managed to talk some coworkers into it and we were going to go after I got back from the South Island, but since I was away nothing got organised and it got pushed back again to... *drumroll* the 4th March! The big risk with these dates was that we only had 3 days off because of the way the rosters worked out, so since it was a day's travel to the national park on each side that gave us one day in which to attempt the hike. If the weather is terrible, the buses don't run. If the weather is kind of crappy, the walk is wet and unpleasant.
It would have been cool to climb Mount Doom, but all of us except Mike agreed that we probably weren't suited to it and it would be better to not take the risk. It also meant we got a little bit of a lie in ;) and started the walk at the very reasonable time of 8:15 in the morning. It starts with a nice slow ascent through a valley, amazing views of mount doom up ahead and mount ruapehu - an active volcano and winter ski resort, and the only mountain in the park that was still snow covered - and then about 9am you hit the devil's stair.
As the desk lady put it: it's called the devil's stair because it's horrible and it never seems to end. Every time you turned the corner a whole new set of stairs appeared before you as if by magic, and they weren't nice casual stairs they were steep painful stairs. Still, Charlotte and I took it slow and steady up the steps, then calm and collected up the next bit of the mountain and by the time we reached the rest area by the turn off for Tongariro, Alexis had only been waiting 40mins for us to catch up (oops!). While char stopped to catch her breath, Alexis and I started up the Tongariro climb. We got some great views over the emerald lakes and the crater, but we could see some cloud coming in so we decided to go back to char and get to our lunch spot in case the mountain became clouded over.
These worries turned out to be completely unfounded, we had an amazingly clear day. There was about 200m of scree and sand slope down from the top to the emerald lakes, during which we all decided we'd made the right decision not to climb mount doom since we were falling over doing down hill over a short distance. The lakes were amazingly coloured, and from there it was (mostly) downhill, past the big blue crater lake and around to the hillside which had a great view over the whole area, you could even see lake Taupo beyond the mountains. I cued up the Lord of the rings soundtrack and started the descent.
It is a loooong descent. As we remarked later, the going down is almost worse than the going up because your knees start to ache and it winds back and forth so much you must be walking about ten times the actual distance! But the scenery was amazing, and once again I focused on taking it slow, aiming to arrive at the car park just in time for the 5pm bus, since I figured I went all that way to spend time in the national park, not to sit in a car park waiting :)
In the end we all made it onto the bus and back to the hostel where we spent a chill evening watching the two towers on VHS in the hostel TV room (you forget what quality used to look like). Then the morning after we woke up to a low hanging cloud and rain which soaked you the moment you stepped outside and were very glad that our chosen day of crossing had turned out so well with the weather :)
Best day walk in the North Island: probably. Best in NZ: idk, I'll have to do a few more and check (although I think for me the glacier walk at Franz Joseph is probably still my number one).
