Te Araroa Day 33, Pureroa to Piro Piro

Starting km: 971
Finishing km: 1009
km covered today: 38

The previous day was mostly road walking and it sucked.  This day was like walking on a road and it was great.

The 84km Timber Trail was opened in 2013 as a mountain bike trail and is part of the TA route as well.  The fact that it was a grade 3 bike track meant that the whole of its length was smooth, well drained and wide.  Its pumice and earth surface was even easier to walk on than city streets.  Even the detour that TA takes up to the Pureroa summit felt like fun and simple walking.

In addition to the beautiful cool green native bush, the trail took in some pretty spectacular feats of engineering as well.  At one point I was toddling along the trail looking at the elevation profile on the map, listening to a river shortly ahead and clearly far below and thinking "this doesn't make sense...
Around one more bend and I met the first of the Timber Trail's first big suspension bridges.  I really wish I could share some photos of them because they're very impressive.  By way of comparison, Vancouver's famous Capilano pedestrian suspension bridge is 140m long and 70m above the valley floor. The biggest of the Timber Trail's is 141m and 58m.

While admiring the bridge I had a lovely conversation with a Kiwi family from Matamata who were biking the trail.  (It was a Saturday, which meant that the trail was pretty busy with cyclists, despite being in a fairly remote part of the North Island.)

They'd be staying at the same campground as me that night and invited me to pop in to the big brown tent for a beer (or, as it turned out, two beers plus a bunch of potato chips, and a great chat about Te Araroa and hop growing.)

Another night, more luxuries provided by trail angels!

Oh! And I just remembered! As is obvious by the start and finish kilometres above, I went over the 1000km mark a bit before arriving at the campsite. Apparently the exact point was commemorated on the trail with rocks on the ground spelling out "1000km!" but I missed this.