Day 10

21km / 7.5 hours

This was a fun day, it started off with some nice walking down the stream before a tricky track alongside the river followed by a tough uphill slog, finally ending with road walking. Quite a varied day and each part was interesting in different ways.

The gentle stream flows down, the path follows it

The first section was primarily stream walking which meant getting the feet wet since you had to wade through the stream downwards. This was quite refreshing although I tended to get pebbles in my shoes which was very uncomfortable.

In some places, the stream got quite deep

After that was a section where the track went alongside the river but not on it; this section was very rough at times, requiring good balance to avoid slipping, good awareness of where the track was and good agility to jump over small gaps at times, was fun to navigate though.

Some large trees dominate the sides of the track

After making it safely past this it was up a ridge which was a better track to walk on but quite steep, having to go up many steps at a time. This was the physically toughest part of the day, requiring an extreme number of breaks after flights of stairs to allow the legs to recharge.

After this was a gentle road walk for ~9km which was good for finishing off the day before coming to Pūketi campsite which was a pleasant place, even featuring a small Kauri forest walk where you could see some massive and old trees still standing.

Some Kauri trees, which are so tall that I couldn’t adequately capture their size.