Te Araroa Day 18, Puhoi to Silverdale

Starting km: 516
Finishing km: 553
km covered today: 37

I reached Puhoi in mid-morning (having bypassed the huge cheese factory up the valley by walking through the bush above it.)  Puhoi is a charming little town, whose central buildings are all done up in this same white-painted, red-roofed style (it just occurs to me that the idea of this, and the colour of the roofs is not entirely didimilar to the painting of all the old buildings in the Dutch Square in Melaka, Malaysia.  Other than this, the two places have just about nothing in common.)

Beyond Puhoi there is no official Te Araroa walking trail.  The trail notes suggest kayaking down to the river mouth, but the tides were wrong and I hadn't booked a kayak, so I decided to try the road walk.  I was a bit wary of this, as it took you along State Highway 1 for a while.  As it turns out, the SH1 section wasn't that bad, with a wide shoulder and a drainage channel to walk in keeping you a couple metres away from the traffic.  Despite taking my time walking through  Wenderholm Regional Park (it was actually kind of fun stopping to read every interpretive display in full) I still arrived at Waiwera waaay too early to walk the low tide route around the coast.  Instead I chose to roadwalk to Orewa, 5km or so to the south.  This road walking was considerably worse than the SH1 section, with much narrower shoulders, but it still wasn't that bad.

I just really liked the happy toilet on this sign in Wenderholm Regional Park

In and after Orewa, one was really and truly in the suburbs of Auckland.  A fact reinforced by the next few km walking along city-maintained walking/biking trail and roads.

From Silverdale (or, indeed, Waiwera or Orewa) it was possible to take a bus into central Auckland.  I did so and headed to my friends' Brendon and Kim's place, where Sarah was meeting me as well.  A quick shower, hugs for everyone (in that order) and off we went for a truly fabulous Lebanese dinner. Mmm... Fatoush!

Auckland's evening sky putting on a show over K-Road

After dinner we went out and played history (and/or pre-history) themed mini-golf.  What a radical change from life on the trail!

The big red Silverdale pin is where I finished walking for the day.  As my plan was to stay in central Auckland with Sarah while I used public transport to reach my trail sections each day, I think I'll have to temporarily stop with the screenshots of where I spent each night, as they'd give the impression that I wasn't getting anywhere at all!