Emeralds, Sapphires and Gold

We have just returned from our epic version of the Abel Tasman Coast Track. I power-washed off nine days worth of sweat and grit in the ridiculously strong and gloriously hot showers here at Old MacDonald’s Farm, and now I want to sleep. But I’ll play on the laptop for a bit and maybe write something that makes sense. Chris is up at reception paying for our site. (I see now, this blog is long, to give you a sense of how long we lived this glorious tramp…)

We awoke this morning from dreams of hot showers, bubbly shampoo, food and clean clothes. (Really, last night felt like Christmas eve, I was so excited to get clean!). Our food had been carefully, desperately rationed since the first day, and we were thrilled to have an extra packet of Barbeque Rice Crackers (when do rice crackers count as food, except when you’re very, very hungry) to chomp on all morning—thanks Andrew. We plodded along at a reasonable pace, had great conversation and gorgeous last views of the park, our temporary home. At last we emerged from the bush—that’s what they call it here, like in Oz, which is what they call Australia—and made the final push across a boardwalk over the Marahau estuary. We exited the park. High Five! And turned toward our old campsite, where our sweet little car patiently awaited our return in a locked carpark. As we turned up the road we saw the campground owner driving towards, and then past us. A few minutes later we reached the empty, dark reception and read; “Office will re-open at 3pm”. Over the road we could see Hank, but our shampoo and bread and laptop may just as well have been in Taiwan. No worries, the slow, calm pace of life on a hike carried over and kept us chill and happy. We sat in the sun with drowsy heads and happy hearts.

So, but the hike! That’s the thing. We loved it. We never went more than an hour without rounding a bend and seeing seas of emerald green and sapphire blue gently lapping golden-sand beaches. Truly the sand is golden, Chris called it “Ground-Up-Golden-Retriever-Fur-Sand” (Not, “Ground-up-Golden-Retriever”, which I accidently heard). The water so dazzled and enchanted us, I wonder why gems aren’t named after Seas. We had gorgeous weather every day but two, and so we spent many hours on secluded little beaches along the way. Most of the time we’d be in paradise, with no one else but birds and seals. Seals are very adorable.

No single day was exceptionally tiring, the huts are set about 4.5 hours walk apart, so we enjoyed the flexibility to stop anywhere we wanted, with no need to rush. The cumulative effect was quite tiring, however, and the meager rations added an extra will-power component to an already exhausting pursuit. Few other people we met would walk for more than three nights, they were all racing to the end, or near end to be picked up in a water taxi and whisked back to civilization. Jaws dropped when they heard not only were we headed for Wainui, the official end, but we would then turn around and walk back! This fact, and our charm, prompted people to take pity on us and supplement our Spartan diet with some much-needed calories. These trampers also gave us much-needed levity and joy. We ended up seeing the same people a few nights in a row and forming some genuine bonds with these strangers.

One day we tramped with the fast-talking, fast-walking Canadian, Sandy. She tells fabulous stories with great wit and enthusiasm, so we were entertained enough to not realize just how quickly she walks up those hills! Chris and I are used to a leisurely pace, Sandy, however, was determined to lose her miniscule “Tui-Tummy” (a.k.a. beer belly) and thunders up and down every saddle and hill. We spent a couple of evenings with Simon, a gentle and cheerful Taiwanese boy, and gleaned lots of information from his sometimes-limited vocabulary. Simon went against the wishes of his family and culture, quit his respectable and desirable government position (at a govt. operated power plant) and came to NZ to travel. All in he would walk as far as we did, but his second half was along a road to Kahurangi National Park where he starts another Great Walk. Simon lumbers steadily along under a teetering backpack that towers above his head, its orange bulk bulging past his narrow hips. One day he sat with us at a small beach and we all chatted while we rested. Chris and I sat at small beaches and rested at least twice a day, but not Simon, who remarked; “Sitting is nice. Not always walking, walking”.

We shared bunk-shelves with Brits, Germans, Kiwis, Taiwanese, Canadians, Austrians, Chinese and more. We passed people on the track and imparted important news, “the heater at Bark Bay is broken” or “the stream is real low right now, you won’t have to take off your shoes”. We were all friends in this common endeavour. We spent one sun-drenched afternoon with a German couple, Robert and Diana, who had us in stitches most of the day. Diana did not trust her perfectly-fine English, but gained confidence as we talked, and I think if we’d had one more day together we would’ve been fast friends. As it is Chris and I will have to think back on their home-brewed Manuka tea (which just tasted like the red plastic bowls we drank from, but smelled like perfume). Robert boldly snipped some rosemary-like twigs from a tree and boiled it up for us; like pioneers, we lived off the land!

Chris and I both have bow-shaped smooth walking sticks, from this same Manuka tree, I believe. We look official. We look like Prophets.

I carried one book, “Franny and Zooey”, Chris brought “The Bourne Identity”. We didn’t bring my journal—nine days of food weigh a lot, even if you don’t bring enough—so every evening we’d flip through our books and tear out a mostly blank page. Gasp! Don’t worry, they were 50 cent books, and “Franny and Zooey” had already led such a tough life it split in two at page 86. At the last two huts, Awaroa and Whariwharangi, we had beautiful wood-burning stoves. These stoves give off much more heat than the standard gas stoves in the more popular huts, and get hot enough to cook on. Buried in the old newspapers in the Wood Box we found a few sudoku puzzles and broke our heads trying to solve the hard ones.

Now for the worriers among you it's time to worry. We did have two days of foul weather. The first of which was quite grim. We were on our way back to the start of the track from the last hut at Whariwharangi. Between this hut and the next at Awaroa lay a massive estuary which can be traversed 1.5 hours before or after dead-low tide. Low tide that day was at 6:30pm, so we planned to leave at 12:30, walk the 4.5 hours and arrive exactly on time to cross. A win-win plan, no waiting and no wading in the dark. However, the driving winds and rains pushed us along at such an incredible, never before seen from Chris and Betsy, rate that we arrived at the 1-hour-to-go point at Totaranui campsite one hour early! What to do? We were drenched with rain and sweat. I suggested we hang out in the largish bathroom and unpack our sleeping bags—no hypothermia for us! Instead we found a group of stranded Germans whose water taxi refused to pick them up and was instead organizing, slowly, some land transport. They’d been sitting in the camp office since 9am. I peeled off my wet clothes and changed into my one dry change—no hypothermia for me! Chris decided to do push-ups and jiggle for the hour instead. As a result he chomped at the bit a mite more fervently than I did, and we set off to the crossing a quarter of an hour earlier than we should have. Once we got there we could see the hut across the estuary. But we could also see the bay was full of water. What can you do in cold, wet weather, when you can see your accommodation glimmering on a bank only 25 minutes away. Why, you hold hands and plunge through waist deep water for 15 minutes. The water wasn’t at our waists the whole 15 minutes, but it swirled around our thighs the rest of the time. I remember racing John at the pool at grandma’s, we didn’t swim, but we ran, as if in slow-motion along the shallow end. This crossing was a 15 minute, slow-motion, cold race. Then we were there, we chopped wood in our dripping clothes and built a roaring fire in no time. Ah. Bliss. As Chris said, it was as if this hut were a 5-star hotel we’d been waiting our whole lives to visit.

My camera stopped focusing on the second day, but Sandy has promised to send us some pictures she took with us, and I pressed my floozy of a memory chip into a couple different cameras along the way. Maybe some day we will patiently sit for hours and download all of our photos.

The 70 Dollar Mistake

Last I wrote we were waiting for the clouds to part in New Plymouth. New Plymouth is a pretty big NZ city with shopping malls, tall buildings, a haze of smog and a fancy, but not very helpful i-site (information center). It is also a free-camping void. I had noticed the absence of little blue tents—the Atlas’ symbol for “informal campgrounds”—for about a hundred km in any direction from New Plymouth. But, I thought, surely we can just park on the road, or ask at the i-site about informal informal-campsites. Either way we wouldn’t spend too much time near the city, New Plymouth existed merely as a gateway to Egmont National Park. We would spend the days hiking in the shadow of Mt. Egmont. Ha! Forget it! We were cursed with rain and a 5-day forecast of dripping clouds.

The 5 days could not be borne for we had nowhere to live in the meantime. Our first, and last night, in New Plymouth left both of us law-abiding fools freaked out. It started out promising enough, when we landed on the outskirts of a small suburb at a town park looking out over the ocean. Families wandered past with their dogs, workers stopped in their cars to watch the sun set before heading home and we even had a picnic table to eat at. A friendly American couple (a doctor and a school teacher here with their four kids for at least five years, but maybe forever) eased our conscience. Sure we could camp out here, there’s no one who monitors the area and everyone breaks the rules on the board all the time—those families with dogs on the path for a start. At about 8:30pm as we watched the end of our movie, some guy pulled up in a truck, his headlights beaming into our car, he parked and we heard a knock on the glass. Move along, this is private land…Eep.

We moved to a row of parking spots across from the beach under the watchful eye of up-scale houses on a hill. Streetlights bathed us in orange light, I lay with my complimentary JetBlue eyemask squishing my eyelashes and flinched every time someone walked past. We survived the night. In fact I think we were incredibly safe in this quiet, upper-class suburb but we were rattled from our brush with the law.

The next morning I took my freezing shower and we walked along New Plymouth’s coastal walkway…

Once the rains came we hid out in the library and used their free internet, or tried to, so patchy was the signal. After about 4 hours of reading and dilly-dallying we faced a decision. Where will we stay the night and do we want to stay in this un-captivating city for five nights on the chance the weather icons of the future will show blazing suns? At 6pm that night we decided to flee New Plymouth, accept it as a waste of gas (a lot to swallow at 70$ a tank) and move along.

We came full circle back to Wanganui and spent a couple nights in a lovely, but windy, free campsite on the beach. Ahhhh.