Te Araroa Day 40, National Park Village to Retaruke Domain

Starting km: 1193
Finishing km: 1237
km covered today: 44

It felt like it had been too long since I'd had a really big, solid day of walking. We'd had some 3Xkm ones on the 42 Traverse, but by this point of the walk, a day really only felt like qualifying as a long walk once it got up above 40km, preferably edging towards 50.

As we'd decided to push the departure date for our canoe trip down the Whanganui River up by a day we had a fine opportunity to remedy this: It was Saturday and we had 54km to walk by 10:30AM Sunday.

The first part was 15km on the Fisher's mountain bike track. It was really lovely. The land around the track had been cleared, but started to regenerate into native bush. Mostly huge valleys full of punga (tree ferns) that looked very Jurassic Park-y.  And the track and its immediate surrounds had been kept clear so you had pretty much constant views of these "forgotten world" valleys alongside and below.

Later in the day it was all road walking, this time along the bottoms of the valleys I'd seen from above earlier.  It was during this that Operation Goat Rescue took place.  There had been wild goats all over the central North Island, and more here than in most places.

I know they're pests that destroy native plants, but I like them, so when I saw one with its head stuck in a fence I couldn't just leave it. 

Despite my fondness for goats, I had no idea how to go about it.  After a bit of trial and error I settled on presenting it with my trekking pole to chew on, be distracted by, etc. while I got near enough to grab it by the horns.  As soon as I'd got a good grip on one horn it was a simple matter to shove its head backwards through the fence and in moments it was scampering off into the thick bush, ready to tell its friends about the terrifying ordeal it had just been through.

We set up camp at the Retaruke Domain behind the community hall, which was in the middle of nowhere. There wasn't a house within a kilometre of it on the main road and I doubt there were ten houses within ten kilometres. So there was no one around to ask if they minded, but I doubt anyone would have.

Around 18:00 the sky started to change from blue with puffy cumulus to decidedly dark grey (thankfully this was after we'd set up our tents and had dinner). By 18:30 the sky had opened up and it was pouring rain again.  This was now five days in a row where the forecast called for an chance of thunderstorms and five days in a row of them materialising over us.

Thus it was that I spent the rest of the evening in my tent tending to occasional drips until the rainfall softened around 20:30, finally allowing me to get to sleep.