Te Araroa Trail – Timber Trail Day 2 – Pureora Forest Park
I reached a couple of milestones today:
- Reached +1000kms – I’ve now completed a third of the distance!
- I walked 37kms today – the longest mileage in a day thus far.
I was up at 5am, and packed up and headed off at 6am. I made really good time on day 2 of the famous Timber trail. It was a nice wide path again, not many hills – through forest & open areas. I averaged 5kms an hour for the first few hours. The sun became strong around 9am so I stopped to take all the (still pretty ineffective) hayfever precautions and sunscreened myself.
The day went pretty fast. There were some more nice suspension bridges, the longest one being 141m long, 51m above the river. It was another really hot day so I stopped to fill my bladder twice (drank 4 litres). Along the trail I refill from streams, but on the North Island I always filter it first using my Sawyer Squeeze filter.
I got to camp at 3.30pm to find Anja and Markus already there (they stayed in a different camp last night). I refilled my water from the stream and splashed myself to cool down.
We ate dinner in a little wooden shelter, which protected us from the still hot sun, and which had bench seats against the wall. It’s lovely to be able to sit upright on a normal seat instead of on the tent floor!! I went to bed at 7.30pm again, supert-tired, after another big day.