matt te araroa

Short trips away from the trail are okay as long as I return to the exact same point to continue. Still quite a bit, it seems. I went to sleep still very sore. Adventure Matt Dowdle March 16, 2017 Harpers Pass, Lost Zealand, Matt, Matt Dowdle, photography, new zealand, purenewzealand, Trees For Survival, Te Araroa Comment After 2 days in Reefton with my uncle John, our minds were full of facts about the history of mining (John is a passionate Reefton historian). The Te Araroa trail is still fairly new and he was sure it would deliver the challenge and adventure he craved. Matt Araroa on Facebookissa. ... John, me, Zilla, Tom, Devina, Michael, Matt, and Alex. Te Araroa's route is technically all linked together but it involves miles of road walking to join the trails. Everybody that I met on the trail seemed to have some type of Sawyer water filter. Te Araroa map A3 size print of the famous Te Araroa (The long pathway) trail in New Zealand originally watercolour painted by Martin Horspool. In here, in heerrrreeeeee. Commotion on the beach – well compared to the serenity up to this point. The two shops in the town were abandoned.  I had last seen seals in Wellington by Red Rocks in 2013, although those seals just were lounging around on the rocks and didn’t move. I turn 40 next year and so I’m due for a mid-life crisis. I’m not much of a foodie and can survive on eating the same thing every day for long periods of time. I saw that your bag looks the same as the one your using on the te Araroa trail. I thought about staying at the Repeater Campsite, but I didn’t want to be camped away from my car which was in the middle of nowhere.  It was nice to finally be off the beach… although it wasn’t actually clear at Ahipara how to get off the beach. Here’s his first photo (back at the start of the walk): Every now and again I would look down at my hiking poles and see the Leki brand, which I often misread as “Lexi”. There was one occasion where I had all five USB outlets in use, as you can see. In brief, I believe Christianity provides me (and anyone) with a renewed relationship with the God of the universe. I’ve never had a bag that sits away from your back before.  It was weird but very nice to finish the walk without a sweaty back!  However it did mean I wasn’t used to the way the pack sat on my back – I could feel the things in the top of the pack on my shoulders and the things at the bottom but not the things in the middle obviously. You have to sleep with your head by the door because the tent tapers down too much at the other end and if you’re 6ft1 like me then your head will be hitting the roof if you sleep with your head at the back.  I think that’s bad Feng Shui, but I’ll live with it.  I was glad to see I could lie down stretched right out and I didn’t touch either end of the tent… but only just.  There was enough place to lie down and also have my pack and clothes next to me.  It felt like heaps of space, and I could sit upright in the tent, but when it came to try and undress in the tent to get into my sleeping bag, I struggled a bit with the low roof (but not too much).  I have no idea how two people would sleep in this “2-man tent” if they have any stuff at all. Well, it has been some time since my last update - 50 days to be precise. I’m not going to write a full-on proper review of the pack until I’ve been walking with it for a while.  But my walk today was decent, it was 14km and I only had a very slight twinge of back pain after the 14km which went away after I took the pack off.  This is why I’m doing these walks – to prepare myself for walking with a pack like this every day. And was wondering what bag it is. But now it’s almost mid-August, and I’ve started buying gear (some of it expensive), so there’s no going back now.  Once you pass the “no going back” point, it’s actually quite scary.  On a sunny day, I look outside and can’t wait to be on the trail.  But when I’m curled up in bed on a rainy morning (and there have been a lot of those recently), I really question why I’m doing this. Lucy talks about the fear, joy, wonder, and at times, boredom, of undertaking such an amazing f The tide is high tomorrow at 7am-ish so that facilitates an early start. Matt made us some brekkie of eggs and toast and after leaving a koha ($$ donation) we got going at 8am. River crossings are excepted. I checked the trail notes, and it is another 32km to Ahipara.  I don’t know if I can do it tomorrow with how much everything aches now.  There is an intermediate campground at 17km tomorrow, however I really really have a craving for an icecream.  A BIG craving, especially since I didn’t get my smoothie.  Hopefully they have at least 8 flavours in Ahipara, and they can get a cone and put one scoop of each flavour on top of it.  That would be sweet (literally). Well, a few cars went past down the beach (it’s an official highway) and two tour buses, but they don’t count.  Rhydian and I walked together for the first bit. I guess I am the only one to have started TA today. At the 15km mark I could finally see the Ahipara hills. I have seven devices that need charging and when you’re in backpackers, there aren’t a lot of power outlets. A farm track often means somebody threw some marker posts up across farmland a decade ago and then forgot about them. The walk tomorrow is 30km to the next campsite. I hope it holds until I get to Kaitaia and and fix it properly (can it be fixed? The first leg of the day was on the eerily gorgeous Turakina Beach. I wasn’t really looking forward to that. There were so many places it could be and I didn’t have the patience. There was a little wind but not too much, a bit of cloud so the sun wasn’t too strong, and not too hot.  The music was on quietly because, even though it was a forestry road, you still have to be careful walking down roads. It holds its air well which is good, and the valve is easy to open and close.  Now I have to wear my hat or beanie to keep my hair out of my face, even when it’s hot. Scariest things for me… will there always be somewhere to sleep?  Or go to the toilet?  And river crossings… the trail has a lot of river crossings.  I’m not much of a water person.  Oh yes… you’re also stuck in a canoe for nearly a week down the Whanganui River.  I’m kind of looking forward to that part, but mostly it scares the hell out of me.  And I’ve only ever camped for two nights in a row before, and definitely never by myself.  And I hardly ever do any cooking on a normal day… so what am I going to eat?  I feel like I might be living off nuts and couscous every day. however as I took the fly off the tent, I realised it was still connected to the tent with two clips, so I had to put the fly down to undo the two clips.  This of course got the tent wet, oops.  Also the groundsheet was very wet and dirty (and covered with slugs).  I am going to have to watch Youtube videos before I go on how to pack away a wet tent.  I was going to ask the occupants of the tents but I never saw them – oh well. My view in the morning was right out into the sunrise. Think back to when you were six or seven and it had rained all night and it was nothing but puddles on the way to school.  This time it stuck around right till the evening. Tania from Utea Park drove me to Cape Reinga at 8:30am to coincide with the outgoing tide.  But eventually I got there. And was wondering what bag it is. I slept through until 6am. I hadn’t camped in those temperatures before, and sure enough because I hadn’t vented the tent fly it was saturated in the morning – despite the fact there had been no rain there was a lot of condensation. I’ve been thinking about walking Te Araroa since I walked the Queen Charlotte Track in February 2019 with my friends (which was about 90km).  We kept seeing that in the shelters we came across, in the register of people passing through, lots of people walking had written their destination as “TA SOBO” (and also occasionally “TA NOBO”) and we couldn’t work out what it meant. Actually I heard those two sentences a lot while I was travelling down that way… I clearly didn’t look like I belonged. And then when it got too dark to see and the wind picked up a bit and it became freezing cold, we all went to our tents, where I’m writing this now. However Tania, being the great host that she is, invited me into her house which is adjacent to the main camping area and allowed me to use her hot shower.  That was very nice of her. It only takes two breaths to blow up fully. The gale force wind from last night was still going in the morning. Here I hope to review each piece of gear I took on the trail. I also started seeing this weird formation all along the beach, which I hadn’t seen further north.  Lots and lots of these little sand holes.  They looked like big Honey Puffs (a breakfast cereal you can get here).  When I put my walking stick into them, water squirted out of the holes.  They were everywhere.  I meant to ask someone local what they were, but I forgot.  I may now never know. A great two person tent that is a good combination of price, size and weight. I realised quickly that that was probably because there’s no phone coverage up here. I was in the main “common area” using the YHA’s computer because it is much, much easier writing blog posts on a proper keyboard than on a small phone. George - you gotta road-test Te Araroa some time! I put some duct tape over them but that’s not gonna hold. Christianity was the big hammer in my mental and spiritual tool box. Coast to Coast. I had a Back Country Cuisine Mexican Chicken which was pretty good. Maybe I might be prepared to take my trail shoes off and put the crocs on to cross rivers, but I understand there are so many river crossings that people get sick of changing their shoes too often. Te Araroa is the route that is almost all on tracks, whereas I walked a lot of roads and also went in to a lot of towns and cities. It was a bit emotional since as well as being the first stop on this journey it was the first place I’ve ever camped away from my car and really out of my comfort zone, and by myself nonetheless. The entire hike was along state highway 1 and it was not the most glorious way to end the trail, but that did not dampen our excitement. But no, just me around, and a few birds. So after two weeks I invested in the relatively light-weight Bluetooth wireless folding keyboard from The Warehouse. There was another car there with one person in it who was just sitting there smoking, and did not have any camping equipment. now @mattski: yes, PLB is on my list. On a serious note, I tried out my Optimus Crux cooking system on Sunday.  I don’t do much cooking on a normal day so I need to use it a few times before I start the trail so that I know what I’m doing.  This time I just used it to boil water.  We were all worried about how windy it was outside but when I turned the gas on and lit it with a match it was so easy.  The flame was much more powerful than I imagined and it felt like the small amount of water I had boiled in only one minute.  It was much easier than I expected! Nobody had looked for it since then (or at least, nobody admitted to looking for it and not finding it). Twilight campsite with my tent in the background. Te Araroa map A3 size print of the famous Te Araroa (The long pathway) trail in New Zealand originally watercolour painted by Martin Horspool. My first day on Te Araroa. I’m a tiny bit worried I got a half a size smaller than I should have but I’ve got them now so I’ll see how they go once I start walking. Geocaching has taken me to many cool places that I would never have visited otherwise. I also have my Osprey Levity 60L lightweight backpack so now I have to start doing some walks with it fully loaded. These stairs had to go to somewhere interesting, turns out it was Twilight Campsite. I’m not a foodie, so I don’t know good food when I find it.  In fact, I’m quite fussy with food, I often won’t eat something if I don’t know what meat it is or if there are ingredients listed that I haven’t heard of or if I simply don’t know the ingredients.  So the fact that I found this nice must be a good sign! At 1am the tent was flapping around so much I was worried about it… So I went outside and checked all the stakes. While I was here I booked in at the YHA in Ahipara to make sure that I had somewhere to sleep tonight. I’ve also never walked with a heavy backpack, well not for any great length of time anyway. Eventually they drove off and I drove off in the other direction. 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And stayed in a straight line Māori politician Sir Āpirana Ngata.Māori in town!

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