Te Araroa Day 36, Tamarunui to a Small Patch of Rocky Grass Somewhere on the 42 Traverse Track

Starting km: 1074
Finishing km: 1111
km covered today: 37

You can probably gather by the title that this day ended less than fabulously.
But it didn't start that way.

We began with a 3.5km stroll out of town to our canoe hire place (conveniently located right on the trail) for our safety briefing.  Our non-Kiwi contingent was a bit confused when one of the staff asked if we had "two Canadians?" This arose because of the Kiwi linguistic oddity of calling all canoes "Canadian canoes." It's still unclear to me why the adjective is required when there are no other types of canoes in common usage in NZ, but there you go. All that said, the briefing included useful info on the canoes and the river (which, while it will doubtless be forgotten in the 5 days til we hit the river, hopefully serves as an memory jogger), fresh bread and prepared to order coffees. So it was definitely worthwhile.

The long road walk following the briefing took us on an all but empty road through pleasant hilly pastureland (complete with ostrich farm and a community centre for a town that didn't really seem to exist anymore) and finished at the town of Owhango.

Paul was terribly upset that the Owhango café (and all other food-selling businesses in the town) had closed since he was last there, but we had the last of the cheesecake with lunch, so the day was still going pretty positively.

After lunch we headed off into the forest on the start of the 42 Traverse 4-wheel drive/mountain bike/walking track. It was still over 45km to the start of the next leg of the trail, so if we wanted to get it done the next day we still needed to do a bit more.

The weather forecast for the area called for afternoon showers, some heavy with a chance if thunderstorms, possibly severe. I don't think it quite met the requirements to be called severe, but around 16:45 we ran smack bang into one. We were soaked very rapidly. The temperature plummeted, and when the rain eased a little we found ourselves walking past big piles of ~7mm hailstones.

Walking was keeping us warm, but we couldn't keep it up much longer as there was a stream crossing coming up.

Blessedly the rain almost stopped for about 10 minutes during which we found a patch of vaguely grassy, damp (as opposed to soaking) ground that would barely fit all four of our tent.  We threw them up, jumped inside and spent a damp but (eventually) warm night in the forest.

I didn't get any blogging done (too afraid to take out my newly acquired phone in the damp tent.) But I did get a lot of reading done on my waterproof e-reader, and ate the last of the baked pasta from the previous night and way too much chocolate.
So it wasn't all bad :-)