Day 10 - chasing waterfalls
Steph’s house —> Kerikeri holiday park 18km
Steph’s house, so we leave when Steph leaves. Today, that meant 7am. Josh and I know we should be starting to walk that early (head start on the heat, more time to recover at the end of the day) but for many reasons, we just can’t quite get our pack down & brekkie any quicker than 90 mins. Inevitably this means we’re setting off around 8am each day. Steph’s deadline gave us a chance to practice being quicker.
By 7.30am (quicker, but not quick enough) we were piled into Steph’s Mum’s car. Wonderfully, she dropped us at the trail head about 7km from their house. With the pick up from Puketi forest hut and this drop of we were actually skipping about 10km of the trail… but it was a road through the farmland. We saw it from the car. It was nice.
The trail started through the fields. Wet with last night’s condensation, the long wispy grass stuck to us like flypaper. It was the kind of grass that left a pithy seedy residue - I’d be finding it all over everything for days to come. The plants up here really know what they’re doing when it comes to pollination.
After a few wet hours of bashing our way through the fields, jumping over the mud and mooing at every other cow, we reached the outskirts of Kerikeri. Steph had text us to say there was a fruit stall selling fresh watermelon on the side of the road which we definitely would have missed - Steph coming through with the goods yet again!
Manicured lawns replaced the overgrown farm tracks as we walked alongside the Kerikeri river and up the Rainbow Falls track. We stopped to admire the falls, which actually had a rainbow! The fact it was almost in a town centre was probably the most extraordinary thing - I’d reserved waterfalls for national parks hours outside civilisation, so it’s proximity to suburbia was quite something.
I attempted to wash the seeds off my legs at the bottom of the waterfall and we headed to the end of the track to grab lunch at The Honey House - a gorgeous cafe on the banks of the river. We very much felt like we were sat by the Thames in Richmond as we ate our pies and let the sun dry our feet. Well, I did, Josh didn’t want to stink the cafe out by taking his shoes off.
We walked the final 3km off trail to the Kerikeri holiday park - maybe the most beautiful spot we’d stayed to date. The park let TA walkers camp down by the river on an unmarked grassy area. Everyone who walked passed us that evening asked how we’d managed to get a good spot! We planned the next few days and went to sleep listening to the water lap over the river stones; a pretty special Boxing Day.
