ahipara to kerikeri

hello again! with our third post in two days, i'm afraid we're in danger of overblogging and losing your interest. thought some of you might want a day-by-day account, though, so here it is.

tuesday, september 1 ahipara to herekino forest, 9.5 miles
a treacherous day after such a nice long rest! the first 5-mile section was road walking, the first of many, but fortunately we were able to take a break for a "cuppa" (cup of tea/coffee/etc) and some cookies at the home of karen, a friendly mother of two young kids that we first met two days ago when arriving in ahipara. she'd spent a year in casper, wyoming on a basketball scholarship in college and had also lived in the south island's university town of dunedin, so we were able to talk a bit about both where we'd come from (u.s.) and where we would be heading (south island) in a few months.

no hospitable people for a while after that, though - the forest seems to make no friends, only enemies. the track was mostly mud and climbed steeply immediately after entering. bryan remarked accurately that it felt more like a jungle than a forest. the only relief was a brief walk along the only well-formed part of the trail, an old logging road. my feet are constantly wet. camped for the night on the trail, on the flattest and driest section that we could find, which really isn't saying much. we're already behind schedule, having made it only halfway through the forest, and will likely have to extend this section by as many as two days. :(

wednesday, september 2 herekino forest to raetea forest - 13.5 miles
nothing to write home about here. finally struggled out of the dang herekino forest around noon, finding ourselves in a beautiful but equally muddy portion of forestry land a few miles later. at least this one was gorgeous (a real elven-style forest), with trees spaced out well enough for the sun to shine through and a creak meandering below the path. the rest of the day included more road walking (usually along low-traffic gravel roads, which isn't so bad), eventually bringing us to the start of the raetea forest, where we camped on very uneven ground (my fault - i chose the site this night) and experienced a most unrestful night. the last 3 miles of hiking, a winding road on a constant up-slope, gave us some beautiful glimpses of the sun falling on the pastureland below.

thursday, september 3 raetea forest to...raetea forest - 7.5 miles :(
the low point of the trail so far. we hate this forest. HATE it! i've spent the day bursting spontaneously into frustrated tears and muttering livid remarks about the forest and the people who created this "trail". to be fair, we should have noticed that it's listed as a route and not a trail, meaning that it's essentially bushwhacking from marker to marker. we played a game called "marker poler" to help us remember to keep looking for markers to ensure that we were on the right trail. it wasn't a very fun game :)

here's what we hated about this horrible death-forest:
-the constant mud, frequently sucking my shoes off my heels and trapping my walking-stick so that i'd be thrown off-balance when trying to move forwards
-the insidious vines winding subtly around our feet for a surprise attack
-frequently not being able to see the steep and slippery path beneath our feet because of the dense foliage
-fallen trees constantly blocking the route - the worst were the ones that fell along the length of the path so as to block as much as possible; the ones falling across the path were bad but endurable
-the face that on the te araroa info sheet, this route is considered to be an 8-hour route (it took us 11 hours, including a 1/2 hr navigational error that led us to ascend a high peak twice), and the 9 miles to and from the forest are not included in the calculations.

camped, again, on the trail. cold. :(

friday, september 4 raetea forest to jackson road - 11.5 miles
had to pull out the gloves for the first time this morning. it's hard to get going when it actually feels like the winter that it is, but we were both anxious to get out of this forest and never, ever return. unfortunately, the end of the forest brings you out to SH1, the main highway in northland, along which we had to walk for 7 miles. fortunately (i feel like i'm re-writing that children's book, "fortunately/unfortunately"), 2 miles into the dangerous shoulder-skirting, we were picked up by a family heading south to whangarei and were invited to join them in hamilton to be interviewed for their radio show, "cosmopolitan news and views", on the local community radio station. it sounds like fun, but after my recent television appearance, i'm a bit hesitant... :) we'll let you know if we end up doing it.

decided gleefully to avoid the puketi forest, as miles of the trail are literally walking in a stream (maybe fun if we hadn't just done the herekino and raetea forests), and take the gravel road bypass that skirts the forest to the north. haven't seen a soul in the last 4 hours, so we hope it won't be a problem. (insert dramatic gunshot story here)

saturday, september 5 jackson road to puketi recreation centre - 14 miles
not a bad section; we made great time despite some very vague directions and found ourselves at the campsite by early afternoon. we even had time for a brief stop at the kauri sanctuary, a 5-minute circle along a boardwalk that give information about the old kauri trees. our GPS gave us a strange location for the recreation centre, making us a bit concerned, but we ran into a hunter (pigs? possums? birds?) along the way who gave us some solid directions. as we ran out of cash in the surprisingly ATM-less ahipara, we had to give the DOC an IOU for staying on their property. oops. had time to let the rain fly dry out in the grass under a warm afternoon sun and even pulled out the cards for a game of rummy. nice evening.

sunday, september 6 puketi recreation centre - 12 miles (+3)
12 miles of road walking again. i'm figuring out the cultural expectations for waving to passing cars - if you're on a paved road, there's no need to wave, as the cars are rushing by to their next destination. if you're on an unpaved road, where presumably the drivers still see other humans as a novelty, you should wave a friendly hello.

i'm not growing any fonder of our GPS, as it's difficult to get an overview of the trails ahead and has given us inaccurate locations for our places of rest two days in a row now. so our hostel that was, according to the GPS, just 300 ft from the trail turned out to be 3 miles from it. thankfully, the kerikeri farm hostel had 1 room left by the time that we finally arrived and was just adorable as i'd hoped it would be. it's located on an orchard, so there are fresh oranges available for the taking and the old farmouse is quite cozy. the free internet is a bonus, too. met another american today, joel from illinois, who started biking (with no previous cycling experience) from IL to CA this summer after graduating from college, then hopped on a plane from LA to NZ and is now biking around the country solo. very cool.

it's now tuesday morning and we're getting ready to head down along the bay of islands and along the east coast. we spent yesterday running errands in town - we found a cute cafe for lunch, sent the bounce box along to whangarei, printed off trail info at the local library, found an adaptor for the camera, and restocked our food for the next week. i'm especially looking forward to today's lunch - green pepper slices, fresh oranges, and a baguette with brie. yum!

we've got a long section with (probably) fewer internet stops ahead, so you might not hear from us for about a week and a half. thanks for reading - we love coming into town and reading your comments!

rachel

PS - the pictures don't at all correspond to the sections that i'm describing, so here's an index:
1-bryan tobogganing down the sand dunes at te paki stream as part of the bus tour up to cape reinga
2-us on day 1 - when we were still excited about the journey :)
3-me on day 1 with a beautiful view of the ocean behind me
4-bryan at the exit of the raetea forest. "surely you wouldn't deprive an old man of his walking stick?"
5-the view of cape reinga on day 1 (you can just barely see the outline of the lighthouse in the middle)