Te Araroa Day 31, Waitomo to Mangaokewa River Gorge

Starting km: 899
Finishing km: 924
km covered today: 25

This day's walk was divided into two parts.  Both had their difficulties, but one (the latter half) was fun in spite of them, while the other was definitely not.

The morning walk from Waitomo to Te Kuiti was through farmland with the occasional bit of bush thrown in.

The farmland was often slippery, difficult to navigate (the farm sections almost never seem to have enough trail markers) and wasn't particularly scenic.  Oh, and I had to wait for 20 minutes while a parade of cows headed off to milking at one point.

The  bush was often overgrown with prickly gorse.

Both contained numerous ups and downs ranging from 20m to 150m, none of which seemed to have any point other than making the trail more difficult. They didn't lead to lovely views. Didn't seem to be shorter or quicker than other less hilly routes. I couldn't have been happier to have arrived in Te Kuiti.

Once in town I spent a lovely-lazy three hours doing a resupply at the supermarket, having lunch at a cafe and recharging my phone (this last was why the other two took as long as they did.)

After lunch the trail headed out of town and into a river gorge whose scale and beauty was one of the bigger surprises of the trail so far. I was not expecting this from King Country.

The trail was easy at first, but soon became harder. Or at least keeping on it became harder.
At one point I seemed to have lost the track. But I did a bit of bush bashing in the general direction it seemed to be headed and soon found orange triangular track markers again.

Unfortunately, following these didn't lead anywhere useful. Just into an ever narrowing strip of flat land between the river beneath and steep hills above.  I tried carrying on in this direction as far as I could, but soon ran out of even vaguely walkable land. I tried climbing up the steep hillside, but that didn't show any sign of leading to more trail.

Eventually I concluded that I would probably have to head way, way back to.where I'd come from to re-find the trail. Or...

The river didn't look too terribly deep or fast. And it was only a few hundred metres to a bit of open, grassy bank, where I'd surely be able to relocate the track.

In I hopped. And like the two previous river walks on Te Araroa it was grand fun. The water got up to bum level at its deepest, just dampening the bottom of my pack.  And before long I was back on the track en route to a bush campsite amongst a grove of cedar trees.  That night it was just me and a loud ruru (NZ native owl) for company.