Day 50: Taumarunui to Poukaria Campsite

Distance Covered: 36 km

It feels great to be on the river. It feels like a vacation. Just a completely different experience than the last 50 days.

We met the company a little after 9, our packs exceptionally heavy with 8 days of food we wouldn’t normally carry. There was some sort of miscommunication within the company and so we didn’t get on the river until around 11.

Emily chose to sit up front, making her the navigator while I was given the back job as helmsman. There was some rough going at first, trying to get the different coordination tasks going. For instance, Emily would sometimes switch paddling sides within a rapid which twisted us around. Meanwhile, I was not making effective use of the sharp stopping maneuver to more effectively turn us at critical points. The result was us eddying out a few times, killing our momentum. I think we got our act together relatively quickly, though, and soon we were zipping through the rapids.

The first part of this river is somewhat steep so even with no rapids we were speeding along. In fact, although we started at 11, we got through 36 km and a lunch break by 5:30. And we had a lot of fun splashing and bouncing our way through the whitewater. Right now, this feels way more fun than hiking through even more mud and the road walking that we would have been doing.

For dinner, we talked about holiday traditions. The Europeans had never heard of pumpkin pie or egg nog. They seemed incredulous that anyone would put raw eggs in milk and drink it. They had pumpkin bread once, so the pie seemed believable. We tried to explain that, in the US, pumpkin spice is a “big thing”. More questions and jokes.

They celebrate Christmas the night before, opening all of their presents. Then they get to stay up late playing with them. They have special breads and some sort of beef casserole. Nobody eats a turkey. For the woman from Finland, going north to Lapland each year was a special treat. We had a lot of great conversation, laughing at all of the things that seem so obvious to our culture (cranberry sauce) that, when you try to explain it, makes little sense at all.

Emily and I also pulled out a special treat: Pavlova and strawberries to share with everyone. Pavlova is an egg white and sugar cake-like dessert. Kind of like a very light angel food cake. And strawberries would never be carried on a hike. So it was a special treat to celebrate making it to the river. This was a big success with our little group.

Tomorrow we keep on heading downstream. We are officially in the National Park so we have to camp at designated spots. The cliffs are so steep that there aren’t other options anyways, but we do have a little flexibility in being able to go on to another site that we didn’t necessarily reserve as long as there is room. There are large groups (16 to 20 people) ahead of and behind us. The one behind us proudly stated their intentions of getting wildly drunk each night so we’re all hoping to avoid that party.