Te Araroa Trail Puketi to Kerikeri
It was another early start on Te Araroa this morning. Our group is now 4 again. Anja and Markus, Luzia and myself. We set off around 7.30am and almost immediately paused to celebrate 200kms on the trail!!
We started with a road walk, then the tril took us across lots of farmland.. beautiful rolling hills with lots of sheep and cows. It was our first introduction to the ‘ankle-breaking’ potential that walking across farmland provides. I thought walking across fields would be easy, but again you have to check every single foot placement for hidden ruts or boggy bits.
Our first foray into dealing with stock was pretty successful (all the sheep and cows kept well away from us).
Rain Rain Go Away
Anja and Markus partake in the hobby of ‘geocache’ and we found one in a really remote location. We happily carried on, and then the rain came… and it didn’t stop!
The terrain switched to road again for a while, and we stumbled into our first ‘trail angel’ moment. Someone had kindly left bags of oranges at a stile for Te Araroa walkers!! We gladly helped ourselves to a couple each.
The rain continued. We sheltered and lunched in a little barn – it was lovely to be out of the strong wind & rain!
We continued on to the beautiful Kerikeri river walk, past the lovely waterfall and eventually plodded into town around 3pm. We did a huge shop for our rest day tomorrow then headed to our accommodation.
When we got into our partment we busied ourselves with much needed showers and washing, then ordered an Indian takeaway, and enjoyed it with a bottle of wine… ooooh the luxury!