Te Araroa Day 35, Ongarue to Tamarunui

Starting km: 1053
Finishing km: 1074
km covered today: 27 (there seems to be something a wee bit off with the cumulative km on the TA app.)

This day was a big one, but for reasons that had relatively little to do with the walking involved.

Paul, Yvonne, Leigh and I had chatted a bit about the upcoming sections of the trail the previous night and decided that it was a good idea to consider tackling them together.

The key thing here was the Whanganui River section.  There's a small section of Te Araroa that follows the river and must be tackled by water. There are also some alternates that extend the river trip by a bit gaining logistical simplicity and reducing cost at the expense of some walking.

While the river trip doesn't begin until 150-175km after Taumarunui, most of the canoe hire companies are located there, meaning it's much simpler to make arrangements while you're passing thought.  And for reasons of cost, safety and rental company policies it's necessary to do the trip as a group.

The four of us seemed to get along pretty well and walked at similar paces, so we decided to see about booking the trip together.

We polished off the 27km road walk to Tamarunui by around noon, booked a family unit in a motel (luxury!) and headed down to the i-site to see what they could arrange.

The folks there were super-helpful and within about 30 minutes we'd booked a 6-day hire for two canoes from Whakahoro to Whanganui (the longest possible canoeing section that still more or less sticks to the general TA route.). This meant that the four of us would be spending the next 12 days together (6 walking, 6 canoeing.) 

We did some other fun stuff that afternoon. I bought a new cheap phone (which means we'll have photos again starting with the next entry!)

We did some food shopping. Partly for the upcoming walk (4 days til the next largish shop). Partly for the canoe trip (this was super luxury. We could buy just about anything, regardless of weight, since the canoe hire folks would pick it all up from us that night, then deliver it to our put-in point in a few days time along with our canoes).  And partly for dinner that night: I'd offered to make a meal for everyone, which (after a bit of drama finding racks for the oven in our unit) turned out to be a huge pasta bake: whole wheat penne, eggpant, capsicum, onion, tomato  sauce and three kinds of cheese. I reckon it weighed in at about 3.8kg, and we did an astonishingly good job of polishing it off, barely  leaving room for the cheesecake Paul had bought for dessert.

As it turned out, our unit shook and shuddered a bit with each large truck that crossed the nearby bridge, but the ensuing food coma ensured I barely noticed.