Day 15 - the race is on
The Farm, Whangaruru —-> Whananaki Holiday park. 27km + 18km hitch.
Steph and Milton were well and truely over the roads. Today was going to be another good chunk of road walking so we left them at The Farm with their thumbs out and we set off along yet another long stretch of gravel.
Our plan for the day was to get to a basic campsite about 25km away - most of this was going to be along roads ending with a fairly steep forest walk; The Helena Bay Ridge track. We trotted along, dodging the cars as they careered around the corners. The road here was like a snake, slithering up the hill for what seemed like hours. It occasionally took a moment to stretch itself out before slithering on its way again. We must have crossed the road to avoid the blind corners 20-30 times. Not even the occasional view over the farmland made it enjoyable.
We reached Helena Bay for lunch and we were pretty pooped, we took an hour to stretch ourselves out in front of the bay and lap up some ocean air.
Steph and Milton text to say they’d made it to the campsite (as most of their morning was a hitch) but they were going to carry on to get to Whananaki for the evening - they’d got a last minute spot at the holiday park. That sounded like a much more fun NYE than camping in farmer’s field. We decided we were going to crack on to the campsite as planned, but if we felt okay when we got there - we’d see if we had time to continue on out of the ridge track and hitch the 18km to Whananaki to meet them - the 18km was a diversion from the normal forest TA route due to closures, so not really part of the official trail - my reasoning for why we could hitch it. Josh needed no reasoning.
With renewed vigour, we paced on up the hill out of Helena bay and onto the track. It was the most scenic trail we’d been on in days - a proper walking trail with actual views and more ferns than I though could exist. The track was supposed to be “a ridge” track, which in my mind should be pretty flat but this was anything but… up and down up and down for a good three hours - sweaty doesn’t come close.
We arrived at our intended camp around 4.30pm and walked over to a picnic table. On it, a packet of crisps was medical taped with a message written on it.
“To Katie and Josh, happy new years! Here’s some salty crunchy potato love. No nuts and chocolate! Love you. Steph the Penguin and Milton. PTO. I carried this for days to celebrate, Milton did fuck all.”
That settled it. They’d left us the best tasting packet of crisps we’d ever had. We couldn’t put them in our mouths fast enough - the salty deliciousness was devoured and we made up our minds; we had to to get to them for NY and buy them a beer to say thanks. The race was on. We had another 2km to go and then had at least a couple of hitches on what we knew were pretty empty roads… people would be out at 5pm on New Year’s Eve right?!
Exhausted, but enthused, we got to the first road around 5.15pm. It couldn’t have been deader. We sat on the floor disheartened and made a plan that if we hadn’t been picked up by 7pm we’d head on back up to the camp for the night and either hitch or walk in the morning. 20 minutes go by and not even a bird had flown by us. Every rustle of wind in the trees got us excited, was that an engine in the distance?
After 25 minutes we got excited again and this time it was a real car, we lept up and eagerly stuck our thumbs out, it pulls over! An angel of a woman gets out and starts clearing her back seat for us and we jump in. She tells us she picked up another couple of walkers on Christmas Day from the same spot - it appears no one wants to walk this diversion. She drops us at the junction of another road as she’s heading the opposite way and we wave her off, grateful that we’ve gotten half way. No more than 4 minutes later a bus pulls up. Thinking that it’s a public bus we ignore it but a guy opens the door and waves at us to come inside. He’s drinking a beer behind the wheel and I tell myself that it’s a 0% beer as we hop up the steps. His girlfriend makes room for us alongside her - they’ve removed all the seats from the bus and it’s now kitted out with a sofa, queen size bed, hammock and a fridge - stocked with salmon and steaks. These guys were travelling in the style. They hand us a beer as we set off towards Whananaki. They weren’t heading to Whananaki, but we were, so they were now! Kiwi people are awesome. (Slightly scary, but awesome). They drop us at the holiday park and Steph and Milton come running out and drag us into the shop - 10 minutes to spare before it shut for the evening. We stocked up on wine, beer and all the choccies we were craving after a very long day.
There was another TA walker Leanne at the holiday park too - we’d say hello to her as she’d walked past us on our day off in Paihia. Stoked that we could all celebrate NYE together, we cheersed, swapped stories of the trail so far and then naturally all went to bed about 9pm. No way could we be up until midnight!
The holiday park kicked off at 12pm with fireworks and cars doing burn outs. I woke up for 10 minutes, contemplated getting out to watch the display but fell asleep again before I could action anything. Welcome to 2023.
