Mount Taranaki

---

January 15, 2008

At 6:15 this morning we said goodbye to Betti before Helen took Eric and I to the airport. It was really sad to have to say goodbye to her, since we have all become really good friends over the last month we’ve spent traveling together.
At the airport we had our first snag of the day. Our plane was “having difficulties,” so the flight had been cancelled. They had frantically tried to put all the passengers on other flights, but of course had forgotten to put us on one. It seemed that it would be very difficult to get us on a flight to Wellington, so I suggested that they could really send us anywhere in the North Island, we just wanted to get across the Strait. They couldn’t fathom that passengers wouldn’t care where they landed, so they kept trying and eventually succeeded in getting us on an 8:50 a.m. flight to Wellington.
In line to go through security after our bags had been checked, Eric turned to me holding his fold-out knife and asked me “Oh, do you think this will be a problem?” Needless to say the knife did not make it onto the flight, and now Eric has turned another piece of our gear into "something we no longer own,” as we’ve become fond of saying.
The flight was quick; thirteen minutes in we began our descent and only spent a total of thirty-three minutes in the air. From the airport we took a bus to a train that took us north and out of the city. So by 10:00 a.m. we had already traveled by plane, train, and automobile.
The train dropped us off in Paekakariki where we began hitchhiking. We had the ambitious goal of getting to Stratford near the west coast and Mount Taranaki, so we were planning on a long day. The first ride was quick and uneventful, but the second was one that I will never forget for all the wrong reasons. We’d been waiting for twenty minutes when two Maori guys around eighteen to twenty years old stopped. They looked a little sketchy, but we got in the car anyway. It was a small car so Eric and I had to hold our backpacks on our laps and I had to put a plastic bag carrying some extra things onto the floor by my feet. As soon as we were in the car they began smoking pot, and behind us on the dash of the back windshield I noticed a pit bull puppy who was sitting up there. We drove for about ten minutes and then something horrible happened. The dog (named Smokey for obvious reasons) had crawled over Eric and me onto the floor and was proceeding to take a huge shit on the plastic bag carrying my stuff. Virtually unphased by this, the driver and his friend pulled over to empty the car of feces as I wiped the bag off the best I could on the grass. I still needed the bag to carry the things and did not have a spare one on hand, so I was out of luck for the moment. I would have liked to have ended our ride at this point, but we were out in the middle of nowhere so we had to stick it out for another twenty minutes in their car before we would be able to part ways with them.
Finally, they brought us to a town called Bulls where we said good riddance to the worst ride of the trip. From there we got two more rides, one in a delivery van and one from a nice local guy who told us a lot about the area. The latter one dropped us off in Hawera (twenty-nine kilometers short of Stratford) around 5:30 p.m., where we got a cabin at a motor park for the night and were satisfied with our progress, despite the tragedies of the day.

January 16, 2008

The hitchhiking fun continued today. I’m not sure what it is about this area, but the people here sure are different. The first guy, a lawyer, was friendly, educated, and gave us a ride in the nicest car we’ve hitched in yet. He was not weird, but the second lady who gave us a ride up the mountain from Stratford to our starting point was about as interesting as they come.
She talked a mile a minute as she drove and was a sharp contrast to her four-year-old son in the backseat next to Eric, whom she said was mute (I think she just may have never given him a chance to talk, though). The woman was very friendly, although impossible to keep up with in conversation. She seemed to be in a manic phase of what I can only assume are wild mood swings. She switched subjects every few seconds and asked us several questions numerous times each. Within one twenty-second time span she had 1) talked about how the times table for multiples of nine was on your fingers, taking her hands off of the steering wheel to show us; 2) hinted that either one of Eric or I would make a good replacement husband for her since her last one had left her; and 3) commanded us to swallow because our eardrums would burst if we didn’t since we were driving uphill. In the end we got where we needed to be, and despite the strange encounter, I was just happy that this hitchhiking ride at least did not end up with a dog defecating on any of my belongings.
From the trailhead we hiked around the southwest side of Mount Taranaki for a couple of hours before arriving at Maketawa hut. The trail cut up and down many steep gorges and was quite strenuous, but it felt good to get some more good hiking in before the end of the journey. We also had clear skies and fantastic views of the mountain, which made it all the more enjoyable.

January 17, 2008

I awoke to a pleasant sight this morning: the sun rising over the clouds that were several hundred meters below the hut, a view that reminded me of the one near Ruapehu, one that I never tire of.
An hour into today’s hike we emerged from the forest and found ourselves at the main visitor center for Taranaki Park. Inside, a very helpful DOC employee helped us plan our route (which we hadn’t really done yet, despite already starting on it), and she also gave Eric the info he needed to do some volunteer work for DOC after I leave to go home next week. We resumed the trail past the visitor center and followed the trail as it wrapped counter-clockwise around the mountain and brought us towards the north side.
Mount Taranaki was once an active volcano, so there are steep gorges on all of its sides that were caused by lava flows. Now these gorges are lined mostly by trees, but they still make the path quite interesting. The track continually descends and then ascends the sides of the gorges, and is quite steep in parts with many rock slips that you must navigate across.
By about 2:00 p.m. we arrived at Holly Hut on the north side of the mountain. It is approximately the same elevation as yesterdays hut, and once again we have impressive views of the mountain and the coastline as well.

January 18, 2008

For those of you who don’t know, I am known to frequently have sleep hallucinations/sleepwalking episodes, but during the past three months I have been relatively free from them. Last night broke that trend, though, as Eric informed me that I had been shouting something at the window during the night. I also got up at one point to chase a mouse (which may or may not have been real) away from our food supply. So, needless to say, it was an interesting night.
The hiking today was interesting in parts, but overall a little boring. The interesting parts were some of the riverbeds we had to cross as erosion had created many unique looks in some of them. At one point I noticed a patch of silt where small rocks were sitting on dirt spires, some as high as three inches. I assume that rain had eroded the dirt away all around it except where the rock sheltered it. Hopefully a picture will help get the point across of why I found it interesting.
The forest was actually the boring part of today-- lots of thick brush to navigate and almost no views of anything through it. I’m beginning to see that alpine hiking is far more impressive and enjoyable. Mount Taranaki is nice, but I’m definitely missing the Alps of the South Island already.

January 19, 2008

We were both up today at the crack of mid-morning. Neither Eric nor I had slept very well last night. I was kept awake much of the time by a mouse (definitely real this time), which was squeaking in the hut wall. But despite our late start, we were ready to leave at exactly our planned time, which was “nine something.” So at 9:58 we set off for what was allegedly our longest day of hiking around this mountain.
The first hour and a half we were climbing through the forest along a ridge with very steep drop-offs on either side. Eventually, we came to a sheer rock face where the track changed direction to sidle around it. Here we encountered three goats which were lucky that it was us who saw them and not the hunters staying at our hut last night. DOC is making an effort to rid many of the parks of non-native species, and goats are near the top of the list. Taranaki has nine full-time hunters to tracks these guys down and “eliminate” them
Further on we came above tree line into the tussock, where we had to traverse many deep ravines. Several of these had us climbing walls of rock nearly vertical, which probably should have required ropes and harnesses. During one such climb, a female hiker coming from the other direction decided to have an argument with us over the route when she (wrongly as it turned out) insisted that we were going the incorrect way. Normally it would have been easy to brush off someone arguing a wrong point, but the fact that she was carrying on and insisting that I respond to her claims while I was still clinging to a rock face thirty feet above the ground made it all the more annoying. Soon we were past it and stopped for lunch with a fantastic view.
After lunch we came to a junction of trails, where we descended down a seemingly endless amount of steps to the Lake Dive Hut 500 meters below. It is the last hut Eric and I will stay at on our journey together, so it is a bit strange to know I won’t be feeling the excitement of reaching a hut after a day of hiking again for some time. But it is a nice hut, and a good one to end the trip on.

January 20, 2008

The last section of this round-the-mountain trek back to the road was quite anti-climatic. It was over two hours of almost nothing but stairs, down a ravine, and then immediately up the other side. We repeated this over and over through the dense forest with only one or two views of the mountain before coming off the track at the visitor center. There we had lunch and waited for the people from the hut last night, who were behind us, to come out so that they could give us a ride down the mountain back to Stratford.
Back in Stratford, we got a cabin at a motor park after meeting numerous interesting (weird) people in town. No offense to Stratford, but how did so many bizarre people end up in one place? The rest of the afternoon was spent reorganizing our belongings, as I will hitchhike north to Auckland tomorrow and Eric will begin his volunteer work for DOC for a few weeks. The time in New Zealand has gone by very quickly, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely, but I am certainly glad to be heading home.

January 21, 2008

Two DOC workers came to the motor park at 8:00 a.m. to pick Eric up, and they agreed to also give me a lift to the edge of town where I could begin hitchhiking. When they dropped me off I was suddenly alone-- a feeling I hadn’t felt in three months. I had nearly 400 kilometers of hitchhiking ahead of me to get to Auckland, but the new challenge of doing it solo was actually pretty exciting.
The first two rides took me about seventy kilometers down the road ,where I waited until a very pleasant German girl picked me up. On her way north to another WWOOFing job, she would take me nearly two and a half hours to just south of Hamilton. We had a wonderful conversation, exchanged stories, and even stopped for coffee along the way. The next guy who gave me a ride told me that he’d walked home in bare feet for six hours last night after his “woman” had kicked him out of the car. He wanted my opinion on what made her “so crazy,” so I was glad to avoid getting too far into that conversation when the ride only lasted five minutes. The next ride was the one Eric and I thought would never happen: someone in a BMW stopping for a hitchhiker. It was very posh sitting in the backseat, but the ride was nothing special really. The guy only wanted to rail against American politicians, and his wife seemed to be afraid of me because I was a hitchhiker.
Soon that ride was also over and I found myself out in the rain. Not wanting to stand there, I took a bus for twenty minutes to Huntly, where I stopped for a wonderful meat pie at the insistence of a lady from the bus. From there I had only 100 kilometers to go, so I stuck my thumb out and was picked up by a well-dressed businessman (also a first). He ended up driving me all the way to downtown Auckland, completing a massive amount of hitchhiking distance in only seven hours. This last guy was also interesting because he leads expeditions through northern India and Nepal once a year, which definitely got my interest. Is it too soon to start thinking of the next adventure?
In Auckland I caught a bus to where Nigel (from the Greenstone track) works, and then we walked back to his apartment. After a great Thai meal, Nigel, Tamara, and I went out to a small cafe where we ate/drank more chocolate products than is probably healthy. Afterwards I got a tour of part of the city, which was unfortunately obscured by weather brought in by a tropical cyclone moving through. Then we went back to their place, where we updated each other on the happenings of the three weeks since we’d seen each other. This is definitely a good way to end my trip.


January 22, 2008

It feels like the end of the trip. Though I have a day and a half left in New Zealand, it’s basically over and my emotions are mixed about it. On one hand I’m going home, which is always a good feeling. But on the other hand I will be leaving a place that has come to feel like a home as well. I guess I should just try to enjoy my remaining time here.
I took the bus from near Nigel and Tamara’s apartment to downtown and walked around for an hour or so. I had an errand to run anyway, so it was good motivation to go back to the heart of the city, which can be a zoo on most days. I ran the errand and decided to take the bus the long way around to get back to the apartment. It turns out today was a good day to ride the bus, as it was free in honor of Sir Edmond Hillary, whose funeral was in Auckland today. I knew who he was before coming to New Zealand, but traveling around the country gave me a much deeper appreciation for what he did during his lifetime. He was really an amazing person.
This evening I was invited to a barbecue at some friends of Nigel's. It was great sitting around with everyone, drinking home-brewed beer, and hearing about the New Zealand music scene, which many of the people were a part of. It was definitely a good night to call my last in the country.


January 23, 2008

After saying goodbye to my hosts and friends before they headed off to work, I spent the morning hanging out in their apartment getting the last of my things packed. With my backpack empty of food as well as a few things I threw away instead of taking home, my bag felt extremely light. Too bad it couldn’t have felt like this the entire trip. Oh well, my days of carrying my life on my back are almost at an end, so I shouldn’t complain.
I headed off for the airport, taking two buses and an hour and a half to get there. I met some people on the bus that had just got to the country and asked me about some good hiking trails they could do. It was strange to be the guy recommending places to visit from my vast stock of experiences, since only three months earlier I was that person who had no idea what New Zealand was really like. It really is amazing what Eric and I have accomplished in three months. I have a feeling that it hasn’t quite set in yet, and that it might take some time to do so.
The flight was relatively uneventful. After four hours and two movies my television in the seatback in front of me broke and couldn’t be fixed. The airline was apologetic and gave me a bottle of wine for the trouble, but upon going through security at the Los Angeles airport to fly to Denver, I couldn’t take it since it was a liquid. The geniuses at the security checkpoint missed a bottle of water with twenty ounces of water in it that I was carrying, though, so I’m not sure why they couldn’t have caught the water and missed the wine instead. But it was free, so I wasn’t too distraught about it.
And suddenly I was home. Happy to see my family and my own bed again, New Zealand seemed like a lifetime away. But after the initial novelty of “home” started to fade, the thought that my time hiking in New Zealand was really over began to sink in. I have a feeling that it won’t be long before I head back to that country for more adventuring. But for now, home is a good place to be.

---