Te Araroa Day 27, Rangiriri to Hamilton

Starting km: 746
Finishing km: 80
km covered today: 54(!!)

I didn't begin my second huge day of walking with the plan of covering another 50+km. As usual, I just set out in the morning planning to walk and see where I was when I started to get tired of walking.

I'd spent the night in a small field behind the Rangiriri café and pie shop and, rather appropriately, made up for my previous night's lack of a cooked meal by having one of Cathy's very tasty veggie pies for breakfast.

The walk started much as the previous day's had finished: roads and stopbanks near the Waikato River. I spent a good chunk of the morning threading my way through herds of cattle and chatting with three kiwi women who were section walking Te Araroa (i.e. walking the whole trail a bit at a time.)

All through the morning, the stacks of the Huntly power station, one of NZ's very few remaining fossil fuelled electricity generators, were on the horizon.

Just after Huntly I stopped by the Waikato for lunch and to dry out my tent from the previous night's rain.

Soon after this it was back into the bush. True, it began with over 1500 stairs, and followed this up with the most tree-root-laden trail I've ever seen in NZ, but the views were great, the forest was pretty and the trail was dry.  I'd not realised how much I must have missed the forest and hills and positively bounced along the trail. I was a bit skeptical of the signposted estimate of 10.5km, 7-8hrs, but even I was surprised when (after climbing down about 2000 more stairs amongst day walkers and joggers [it was Sunday] I emerged from the.forest barely 3.5 hours after entering it.

We'll, that settled that. It was only about 18km to Hamilton and the trail was a well paved, nicely graded stroll beside the river the whole way.  I'd carry on to the outskirts of Hamilton then as soon as I could, I'd hop on a city bus into town.

But, as I observed earlier, it was Sunday. As far as I could tell the buses weren't running from the first suburb I came to and if I carried on looking I'd be leaving the most efficient route into town.  Oh well. Looks like I'm walking those last 9km.

Around 19:45 I passed then 792km mark for those of you familiar with the Oxfam trailwalker 100km event, the NZ version gives you 36 hours to complete it. Since I'd started at km 692 at 08:30 the previous morning, I'd just (unofficially) completed my trailwalker for the year!

I arrived in Hamilton completely exhausted. To add insult to injury, the hostel I'd picked didn't allow alcohol inside, so I couldn't even celebrate with a beer or two.  I did, however manage to devour a dinner of chips and guacamole (3 avocados, 2 tomatoes, half an onion) before​ collapsing into bed.