New Zealand (Week #8, #9 + #10)

Following our Wellington housesit at the end of January, we hit the road in Totoro (that’s the name of our little Honda Fit) and made our way north to visit some friends in the Wairarapa for a few days. It was really nice to be there as it’s our future home and we wanted to get a better feel for the place. We spent a few hours at the library in Featherston and noticed that the librarian seemed to know almost everyone who came into the library. We’re definitely looking forward to being on a first name basis with our local town librarian. On the topic of the house, it’s all a done deal now! We’re super excited about being the newest residents of Featherston and we close on the house on March 1. We won’t actually move into the house until later in the year but once we do, we have a guest bedroom and we’re expecting visitors!

After our short visit to the Wairarapa, we headed up to the Hawkes Bay which had been on our short list of places to check out properties. Despite not needing to explore as a potential home anymore, we still had a great visit which included going up Te Mata Peak every day as we were staying at an AirBnb that was super close to the park. We were glad that we went to Hawkes Bay when we did as they unfortunately were hit really badly by Cyclone Gabrielle two days ago and have considerable flooding, road/bridge washouts and other storm damage. 

New Zealand has nine great walks which showcase the splendor of the country. We’ve done a number of them before and decided that we’d add the Lake Waikaremoana Great Walk to the list. So we booked ourselves in to do the trip over the Waitangi Day holiday weekend. It was a beautiful trip but it was interesting to learn that the Dept of Conservation had disestablished the national park and turned the land over to the local Iwi (Maori tribe) - the Tuhoe. Tuhoe are now guardians of the land and they seem to prefer that the facilities (e.g., huts, tracks, pit toilets, etc) deteriorate and eventually disappear…almost as if they’re being swallowed by the forest. I kind of liked this philosophy but Ginny was not impressed particularly as it pertained to the grotty pit toilets. 

One of the nights we had to camp as the hut was fully booked. That was no problem as we had brought our tent and sleeping pads along for the trip. We snagged a great campsite on the shore of the lake with an incredible view. I nodded off to sleep fairly early and was awoken in the middle of the night by Ginny saying that there was a possum and a rat eating a hole in my pack outside of the tent! We both had food in our packs which is what the rodents were after. When we’re in bear country, we would be much more cautious with our food storage but we didn’t think it would be a problem in NZ where there are no animals that’ll hurt you other than maybe sharks and wild pigs. Anyhow, Ginny pulled both packs inside the tent thinking that would solve the problem. I had a momentary thought that we should not do that before falling back asleep. A couple hours later, I was awoken again but this time it was by a rat rustling around in our tent! Let’s call him Oliver as that’s what Ginny and I have named him. So Oliver chewed a bunch more holes in our tent and then let himself in for a tasty meal of trail mix and chocolate. It was pitch black so we were quite startled and made a mad dash to get out of the tent before we were bitten by him. After some coercion and coaxing, we managed to get Oliver to excuse himself from the dinner table and exit out of our tent. I should also mention that it was pouring rain during all of these shenanigans. Now I decided that it was time to do what I thought we should do earlier (before falling asleep) which was to pull all of the food out of our packs and hang it in a stuff sack well away from our tent. I went ahead and did that before stumbling back to the tent hoping to get a few more hours of sleep before daybreak. When I got up in the morning, I went over to check on the stuff sack and discovered that Oliver had indeed visited and chewed another hole in another piece of gear and broke into another bag of trail mix. It was a trying night for sure and the silver lining is that I think Oliver got more vinyl and plastic than he did food! And the thought of the “spicy” trail mix coming out his other end also gave us a few chuckles.

After Waikaremoana, we made our way to Rotorua where I would be running the 108k distance of the Tarawera Ultramarathon. The course had changed in the final week as there had been a slip on one of the trails that we were supposed to be running on. The net impact was that the course would be slightly longer, have more overlap with the other distances and would include slightly less elevation than originally planned. The weather was good for racing - sunny but not too hot - and the course was very runnable so it made for some very fast times. The highlight of the race for me was running the 7k stretch from Redwood aid station to the Village Green aid station with pro ultra runner Zach Miller. Zach was over from the US to run the Tarawera 100 mile race and he won the race in a time of 14:41 which was a course record and got him an entry to the highly-coveted UTMB 100 mile race in Chamonix, France. I was very happy with my race as well as I finished in 10:41 which was a new personal best for the 100k distance and good for 31st overall and 6th in my age group. 

We were supposed to be on the South Island now starting a two week visit there but our ferry crossing on Tuesday was cancelled due to Cyclone Gabrielle. It was disappointing to have to cancel that trip but we are now getting to see a few spots on the North Island that we didn’t think we’d make it to such as New Plymouth where we are right now.