Tackling the Te Araroa trail
Instead of the traditional OE, Matt Dowdle decided to walk the length of New Zealand. reports.
In a race to beat the cyclone that was wreaking havoc in the North Island and heading south, Matt Dowdle and his girlfriend Abby Corkery knew they had to get to Longwood Forest fast.
It was near the end of Dowdle’s 126-day hike from the upper tip of the North Island to the lower tip of the South on the Te Araroa trail. He and Corkery had taken a detour to top up their dwindling food supplies in Te Anau and needed to get back on track.
The pair waited on the long, lonely road out of town for an hour before a local pulled up and offered to take them them a few kilometres further. ‘‘Long story short, four rides later, we arrived at the road leading to Longwood Forest,’’ says Dowdle, a 24-year-old photographer and graphic designer from Auckland.
He and Corkery, who had joined him for the final third of his almost 3000 kilometre trip, spent a cold, wet night before beginning their muddy climb up 805m Bald Hill. Reaching the summit, they got a first (hazy) glimpse of Bluff, their final destination, and felt they were standing, alone but in solidarity, at the bottom of the world.
‘‘I was hit with an overwhelming sense of achievement,’’ Dowdle says. ‘‘I had walked just over 2800km of New Zealand and the reality of being so close to Bluff and the end of my journey was finally kicking in.’’
Having recently passed through the knockout scenery of Queenstown and Wanaka, the final 40km was a bit of a comedown: the track cut inland before passing a sewage treatment plan and joining a surprisingly busy State Highway 1.
Arriving in Bluff, Dowdle’s sense of accomplishment was bittersweet. The couple hugged, kissed, took the obligatory photos by the sign at the end of the road and wondered what they were going to do now the journey was over.
‘‘I was happy but it was almost an anticlimax because I’d reached the bottom of New Zealand and now had to hitch my way back up to Invercargill. There was no one around to congratulate us; no one to give us a standing ovation,’’ he says.
After a road trip that had been anything but pedestrian, it was hardly surprising Dowdle had mixed feelings about it coming to an end.
Now back in Auckland and preparing for an exhibition of photos from the trip, Dowdle says he’s still working on ‘‘coming back to reality’’.
On the road, he says, he felt more alive than he ever had. ‘‘I’d go to sleep when it got dark and woke up when it got light and always felt very switched on. It was a very natural way to live.’’ Dowdle had toyed with the idea of a traditional OE before deciding it made sense to see his own country properly first. The Te Araroa trail is still fairly new and he was sure it would deliver the challenge and adventure he craved. A seasoned ‘‘weekend adventurer’’, he felt ready to tackle anything it could throw at him.
‘‘I tried to plan a bit but you really just have to get on the trail and take each day as it comes.’’
New Zealand’s unpredictable weather toyed with him from the outset, lashing him with rain, hail, snow and biting southerly winds, seemingly mocking his yearning for extreme adventure.
It was a ‘‘weather bomb’’ that detonated as he made his way through the Ruahine Ranges that eventually blew him off course. He and Corkery’s brother Andrew, who had joined him for his leg of the walk, spent their first day together fighting to keep the bone-chilling southerly from knocking them off the steep track. After 14 hours, the pair made it to Parks Peak Hut, knowing they had another tough day ahead.
‘‘The wind had been taken out of our sails. I looked back at Andrew as we climbed over 1572m high Tupari [the next morning] and his face said it all... Now that we were on the tops and nicely exposed, the wind was howling through. We were battling at every footstep,’’ he says.
Begrudgingly giving up on his plan to make it to Sparrowhawk Bivouac, Dowdle agreed to take a short but very steep trail across the mountains to the hut at Maropea Forks. Again, the wind did its best to push them over the edge, but they made it to the hut before they felt the full force of the weather bomb that brought snow to the lower North and South Islands in midsummer.
It was a disappointing setback, but also a perfect excuse for a break.
‘‘It was 15 days since I last rested my body, so I was happy to put my feet up for the day and enjoy some muchneeded rest,’’ says Dowdle.
Despite such setbacks, the whole trip went surprisingly smoothly.
‘‘I thought I’d get stuck a lot more than I did. There were so many things that could have gone wrong.’’
Dowdle cites the 12 days he spent on a detour through thick bush in the central North Island as the toughest stretch – surprise, surprise – ‘‘things got a bit hairy with the weather’’.
His highlights include the Nelson Lakes – ‘‘they’re just beautiful with the mountains in the background’’ – and the Ruahines, which had provided the physical and mental challenge he’d wanted. His greatest pleasure though came from the simple act of walking through parts of the country he’d previously only dreamed about.
‘‘It felt like we had the whole of New Zealand to ourselves,’’ he said.
You can see more of Matt’s pictures and read about his adventures on his blog lostzealand.co.nz.