Ship Cove to Camp Bay aka Te Araroa LASH Day 4

The day started at 1 am.

Oh, actually, I should probably mention that I haven’t invented teleportation yet. Some of my favorite people, including Captain Kirk and Doctor Who, promised me this when I was a kid in the 1980s, but the sad reality is that teleportation doesn’t exist yet.

So, for those keen readers who may have noticed that I jumped from the North Island of New Zealand to the South Island of New Zealand, well, there’s a story to tell there.

I left them all on the edge of their seats as I traversed the Tararuas, one of the muddiest and most difficult parts of New Zealand. It turns out that when I woke up on the fourth day of the Tararua crossing, I made the decision that the weather was absolutely apocalyptic. Now, I don’t use this word lightly. The forecast for the following week included snow in the mountains and winds exceeding 120 kilometers per hour. Now I enjoy good weather like any other hiker, but that was enough to say, you know what, I live very close to this trail and I’m going to the shelter of my house and I’ll be back in a week when New Zealand decides it’s really summer.

I left Tararua National Park and took a train to Wellington, where I was very lucky to find a cheap flight the next day to take me back from Wellington to Auckland.

After a week of waiting for a tropical cyclone to pass through New Zealand, I decided it was time to get back on the road. And that brings me to today, at 1am, when my ferry from Wellington to Picton had spent the last hour and a half trying to dock. What was the delay, you ask? Well, it turns out that only the tail of the cyclone was still working its magic, and the 100 km/h winds were making it very, very difficult for the large ferry to dock.

At around 2am I arrived at a hostel in Picton and promptly fell asleep in my dorm bed for five hours. I got up, ate my overnight oats and headed out on the next water trip that would take me from Picton to the start of the South Island TA, Ship Cove.

Back on the road

It felt great to be back on the road. The first section of the South Island if you are heading to SOBO is the Queen Charlotte Track. This multi-use trail, for both mountain bikers and hikers, runs through the Marlborough Sounds, a stunning archipelago. The small ferry pulled away from the deck leaving me and a few other hardy souls to begin heading west towards the beautiful rainforest.

This stretch of trail is an absolute dream. Wide, level for bikes and with excellent drainage, so despite the recent torrential rain caused by the cyclone, the base is hard and there is no sign of the mud that was the Tararuas.

As a result, I made excellent time and hummed through the beautiful, lush landscape.

After the trauma that was the Tararuas, this really felt like a holiday after hiking. The miles simply melted away beneath my feet. I was having such a great time that it only seemed appropriate to roll out my favorite luxury item, the hammock. I made some soft dyneema shackles to replace the carabiners, and also bought some dyneema tree huggers, which reduced the weight to a staggering 210g. This makes me so happy!

I wandered through the afternoon after my nap and continued to be amazed at how beautiful and varied New Zealand is in its geography. I mean, the bays sometimes looked like a tropical paradise.

I had planned to stop earlier in the day, but the ease of movement continued, so I continued on toward Camp Bay. At about 6pm I stopped for dinner, grateful that the weather had been favorable all day and with solid signs that summer had returned.

I arrived at camp around 7 pm and was pleased to see that there were already many TA hikers present. I set up my tent after a quick chat with other hikers, did some stretching and fell fast asleep after a fantastic first day back at 9pm.

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