Day 41: Pirongia Forest to Waitomo Caves

Distance Covered: 27 km

The stealth campsite ended up being great. Secluded, quiet, and good views. Just about as good as it gets.

The weather was still misty, foggy, and sometimes rainy. The temperature was cool enough to wear a jacket until we started hiking.

The trail started with following the farm road. This was great hiking. Nice gradient, open, and graveled to minimize the mud. As we were on a ridge, there were good views in many directions.
Of course, it couldn’t stay that way all day and it wasn’t long before we turned off onto a bush track. A deeply muddy, overgrown bush track similar to the many others we’ve hiked now. But today was different! Today was the “nothing will stop us day”. No amount of mud or incline would give us pause as we charged ahead. Tomorrow is going to be a day off and so today we let nothing deter us from our goal.

Which is good because the mud was plentiful, deep, covered with water, and went on for kilometers. Splash, muck, slorp, splash, repeat. At least the weather started to clear.

After some time, this ended and became nice farm road to a pasture. Open views of green hills and easy walking made this a treat after so much slogging. We had a hard time deciding to go down the hill.

We soon found out it was just the first ridge, though, as we were now led off the road and onto fence walking. We went down steeply and then up steeply to another ridge. Then down and up and down and up to more. The ridge traverses kept coming, about 100 meters or so of elevation change each time on slick grass and 45 degree or higher inclines. Work those legs! This ended with one more grand ridge with the best views. Very nice. So we ate lunch up there.

Next up was what we thought would be following a nice farm road down into the river valley. Oops. Turns out we were on the overgrown, crumbling track just on the other side of the fence from the nice road. We were not allowed on the road at all. Many gorse bushes welcomed us. Some track precariously overhung previous landslide areas. It was very slow going as we picked and pushed around. Meanwhile, the road was just… right… there…

Here's a picture where the trail plunges right into the spiky gorse.

One interesting thing about that section was a bush that I’ll call the Cicada bush. The cicadas here are smaller than those in the US and are also a metallic green. Pretty cool looking… kind of sporty. Anyway, they loved one type of bush because as we approached each one, hundreds of them would fly out. In a way, it was magical… hundreds of metallic green bugs flying in every direction chaotically is like real life special effects. The side effect of the chaos was that every direction of flight coupled with the density of bush meant cicadas down my shirt. Up my sleeves, down my collar… I even found one (and got it out with Emily’s help) a couple of hours later crawling around my back. They don’t bite… they just crawl around.

There was a nice forest section, even featuring switchbacks after the cicada bush descent. This led to a bad forest section with the wet potters clay type mud on the final descent into the river. The river was refreshing.

And then it was uphill through a tunnel of gorse, scrambling up the clay as the heat of the afternoon ramped up, baking out the moisture and making the air thick with humidity. It is an unfortunate effect of physics that refreshing streams are found at the bottom of hills and not at the top. Also unfortunate is that gorse seems to have no economic value and so grows unchecked so frequently.

A nice walk on a bike/horse/hike trail greeted us at the top of the climb with a couple of hiker side trails thrown in that brought welcome shade and nice forays through the podocarp forest.
And then! Road walking. Always road walking.

We stopped by the general store to buy delicious things for our day off. Sadly, the store was one shelf with pasta, sauce, and a bag of mints. It did have a cafe with delicious things to order, though. Emily got a large Caesar salad (vegetables!) and I got a lamb and mint pie. Both were great. (The lamb and mint pie was like eating dinner and dessert together.)

Then onto the YHA a couple of km out of town and off track. Kind of a shame to walk km’s off, but they were about $40 cheaper than options in town. 

The man who greeted us there was bustling around, cracking one-liner jokes, and seemed fit to star in a British comedy. He gave us an unexpected 50% discount since we were doing the “walky walky”. Okey Dokey!

And now we are in bed, looking forward to a day off. Today ended up being quite a bit of work in some rough terrain. It feels good knowing we can take it easy tomorrow.