Bewitching times on Nydia Track
Leaving kids and partners to fend for themselves, Sarah Catherall and her girlfriends go bush for a weekend to tackle Nydia Track in Pelorus Sound.
It’s Saturday night – and we’ve swapped our tramping boots and sweaty, grubby walking gear for black dresses and lipstick. We’re a group of Wellington women –
11 mothers with 37 kids between us – and we’re huddled around a firepit in a lodge nestled in Pelorus Sound. At 7pm, the sun has almost disappeared, and a cold southerly is blowing in off the water.
We’ve donned black dresses because it’s Anna’s birthday: she’s one of the original women who started these annual girls’ walking weekends.
Anna has left her family to spend her 51st birthday walking for two days instead.
Like the other guests, we have walked 15 kilometres to get here, and we’re staying at On the Track Lodge, in Nydia Bay.
The lodge manager served a ku¯ mara curry at 6pm, which was delicious. After dinner, we collected firewood from the beach and began building our bonfire.
As the birds swoop at dusk, a fellow guest who has also tramped in, comments to one of the girls: ‘‘I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you look like a bunch of witches around a cauldron.’’
That sets us off. We laugh and we cackle, sides aching. One of our group stokes the fire, causing sparks to fly. From this angle, she does look surprisingly witch-like.
These girls’ weekends began in 2007, when a core group decided to get together for a weekend to walk a track. The friends thought it would be a way to escape children, husbands/partners and general life busyness and go bush.
Anna (the birthday girl) wishes she had kept a journal of where the group has been over the years. She’s walked most of them, only dipping out when she was pregnant, or had newborns.
I joined about four years ago, when a friend, Catherine, invited me. So far I’ve walked the Tongariro Crossing, the three-day DOC track on Great Barrier Island, and a farm walk in the Wairarapa with this crew.
This time, we’re walking Nydia Track, which was a relative secret until media began writing about it a couple of years ago.
In three decades of living on and off in Wellington, I hadn’t visited Pelorus Sound, the largest of the Marlborough sounds. I’ve been to Queen Charlotte Sound several times and walked that track twice, but Pelorus Sound is a more remote world. The closest I’d got to it was spying hills and ranges, and drowned river valleys, as I had flown into Wellington.
These walking weekends start early, which is not great for a night owl like me. At 8am on Saturday, we pile into the minivan heading for Kaiuma Bay, on the eastern end of the track, to start our tramp.
We wind through Havelock, past some of the dozens of mussel boats moored in the bay, then eventually hit a gravel road with a number of oneway bridges.
Kaiuma Bay is a small settlement on the edge of Pelorus Sound, where Walk Pelorus tour guide Jo Peachy lives with her partner.
Peachy is waiting on the water’s edge with her van full of bags of snacks, walking sticks for those who need them – and maps. Peachy points us towards the start of the walk and leaves us to it.
The first hill is a grind, although we are flanked by lush, green ferns and native bush, which takes some of the pain away.
At the top, the view across Pelorus Sound is stunning. The emerald green water is laid out like a silk cloth, more like a lake than an inlet. We’ve already broken into groups, depending on energy and fitness levels, and started talking about life. Being amid nature stimulates conversation.
Fifteen years ago I would sit around with other mothers in cafes and we talked about whether our babies were eating, pooing and sleeping. Now, we’re walking and talking about new topics related to life and this stage of motherhood. After the year we’ve had (our 2020 walk was a fortnight before the Covid lockdown), it’s also good to laugh.
Of the 11 of us, four of us have first-year Otago University students, all in the same hall and all friends. The night before, they were on Snapchat with us as they were hanging out together.
On the track, though, our phones have no service. We’re out of reach, and some of us are relieved about that. We stop in a pine forest at the top of the first track for lunch. Pine needles carpet the track, glistening in the midday light. Pine trees reach for the bright blue sky.
At the next ridge, a group of mountain bikers rest for lunch, looking out at the view and where we are headed.
The second half of the walk is mostly downhill. Back on flat ground, Deb and I walk across farmland, passing cows and beehives. We take our shoes off for a couple of river crossings and, finally, we’re at the lodge. First in gets first pick of the beds.
After our night of cackling around the bonfire, we wake early to begin day two. We have a 5-6-hour tramp to our pick-up spot at Duncan’s Bay and a
flight back to Wellington.
We leave our bags on the lodge deck; we’ll be reunited with them at the airport.
Nydia Bay looks like glass when we start walking at 9am. The first 45 minutes of the track is along the water’s edge, beneath a canopy of ponga fanning the path like umbrellas, then we spy an eel in a creek to the left of the path, waiting to be fed. Anna drops pieces of bacon and egg pie in the water, and Sam reaches out to try to stroke the eel, which makes us all laugh as she’s been paranoid about spiders since we started the walk.
I prefer day two of the track, when the water is beside us or we peek at it below through gaps in the bush.
It’s also warmer without the first day’s southerly windchill. Some of the girls are hot, so we stop at Pipi Beach, 15 minutes from the end of the track.
Aptly named, the beach is laden with pipi shells. I hear a crunch and then a splash. Michelle has run into the water, partially stripped off but still wearing her trainers. Most of the others strip down to underwear and follow. We then hear a shriek: Michelle has been stung by a bee, and she’s mildly allergic.
It’s a relief that our group includes three nurses and a physio. Nat calls out for a bank card, which she uses to scrape the poison out of Michelle’s arm before it sets in.
After lazing on the beach for an hour, we don’t want to don our walking shoes again, but there’s a plane to catch and we’re not at the end of the track.
Fifteen minutes of walking later, Denise, our driver, meets us at Duncan’s Bay with the minivan and beer. Bottles clink as we pose in front of the Nydia Track sign for a group photo.
‘‘Where shall we go next year?’’ someone asks.
‘I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you look like a bunch of witches around a cauldron.’ A FELLOW TRAMPER’S SUMMATION OF SARAH CATHERALL’S GROUP