After wrapping up our Auckland housesit in early January, we drove south to Taupo where we were planning to spend a couple nights at our friend Catriona’s house followed by a housesit that we lined up through Kiwi House Sitters. Lake Taupo is the largest lake in New Zealand and it sits in the caldera of the Taupo volcano, which hasn’t erupted in 1,800 years but is still considered active, believe it or not. Lake Taupo reminds me of Lake Tahoe as they’re both massive lakes surrounded by beautiful, majestic mountains. We spent a week in Taupo which was bursting at the seams with visitors as it’s peak holiday season right now. Despite the crowds, we had lots of fun going for runs, walks and we also took a nice hot soak at one of the thermal pools in town. Our housesit was probably the easiest one yet as we only had to take care of a cat named Oskar. Oskar was an older cat who loved head butting us (no joke!) and bossing us around, demanding that we feed him Jimbo’s at least five times a day.
One of my favorite podcasts is 99% Invisible which covers a range of topics related to architecture, design and urban planning. One of the best episodes is Structural Integrity which documents some really interesting issues related to the structural engineering of the Citicorp Center in Manhattan. Another thing that I’ve learned from this podcast is to stop and read plaques and historic monuments as they often share really interesting information about an area. On my run last week on the Great Lake Trail at Lake Taupo, I put this advice to practice and stopped to read a trail plaque that I blazed by earlier in the week on a different run. I’m so glad that I stopped as I learned about the history of constructing this beautiful trail which runs from Kinloch to Whakaipo Bay. I love the great sense of humor and their ‘get ‘er done’ mindset which is a great attribute for a trail building group. See shots from the plaque below including the world’s fastest feasibility study which was completed at the local pub.
On Monday, we drove south from Taupo towards the Tararua ranges which is a well known tramping destination, particularly for Wellingtonians. We had booked ourselves into doing a three day, two night tramp known as the Holdsworth-Jumbo Circuit which included staying at both Powell and Jumbo huts. The weather forecast was pretty lousy but we forged ahead anyhow hoping for the best. Our first day of hiking wasn’t too bad as we were mostly in the forest and therefore largely sheltered from the rain and wind. After about three hours, we made it to Powell Hut which is a fairly new hut that sleeps 32 people. It turned out that there were only two other parties sharing the hut with us that night - a couple from Wellington and a father and son from Auckland. The next morning the weather had made a turn for the worse as both the wind and rain had picked up considerably and were madly pelting the hut windows as we gazed out into the misty morning fog. The Wellington couple promptly exited towards the carpark as they were doing the circuit in the counter-clockwise direction. The father and son were planning to do the circuit in the clockwise direction (same as us) but also decided to hike back out to the carpark after trying to wait the weather out all morning with no improvement in visibility, wind speed or amount of rain. We decided to just stay at the hut another night instead of pushing on along the exposed ridge line to Jumbo Hut under such poor weather conditions. I did day hike up to Mt Holdworth just to get out of the hut for a couple hours but the views were non-existent and I was thoroughly drenched and ready to get back to the hut. We ended up having the hut to ourselves that night as no one else was crazy enough to hike into the Tararuas in such miserable weather conditions. The next morning we hiked back out to the carpark the way we came in and it was really pouring, although the visibility had improved and the winds had also abated somewhat. It was actually really beautiful to see so many raging waterfalls and rivers - the trail actually functioned as a small stream with water gushing downhill. After a couple hours, we arrived at our car looking like a couple of drowned rats and we have never been so happy to have some dry clothes to change into. Despite the trying weather conditions, it was still a fun trip and we’ll have to return again to actually see what the Tararuas look like and finally make it to Jumbo Hut.
We spent the last couple days on the Kapiti Coast at an AirBnB which was a nice respite after our soaking wet tramping trip. Ginny’s legs were extremely sore from the last day’s all downhill hike so she recovered while I did some training runs and got a little bit of work in as well. Now we’ve arrived at our two week housesit in Khandallah, which is a suburb in Wellington. We’re looking after two cavoodles named Jasper and Nova who are siblings and are champion sleepers. We’re looking forward to exploring the city which is only about fifteen minutes away!
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