Finishing km: 1539
km covered today: 30
FINALLY! Back into some non-road walking!
Admittedly, some of it was just trails through experimental pasture-lands owned by Massey University. And quite a bit was on mountain bike tracks. And some was on recently logged (and thus pretty ugly looking) forestry roads. And some was on actual roads. But still. Virtually all of it was more pleasant than the previous couple of days.
Also exciting (even moreso in fact) was that I went over the halfway point on the trail this day. Exactly where was unclear. There were two signs, about 7km apart, both claiming to be the halfway point. And another more general sign a little past the second one that mentioned a different (longer) total length for the track that meant halfway was still 10km or so away. If I've got it right, the middle sign (the fancy green one in the photos below) was actually pretty close to being the correct halfway point.
By the time we got to that one, I'd caught up to Yvonne and Leigh, who had had an earlier start to the day.
We walked together and met Jinni (sp?) a young Korean woman who was notable in being the first non Kiwi/European/North American I'd yet met on the trail.
She stopped about a kilometre before we did, but this meant I got to say hi again, when after setting up our tents on a blustery hillside, we realized that the nearest water source was a bit over a kilometre back the way we'd come.
Ah well, it had been a pretty short day and even with the walk back for water there was still plenty of time to get dinner cooked up (albeit a couple of minutes walk down the trail into the forest to get out of the wind.)
AND I WAS HALFWAY FINISHED!
HALF WAY!!! Woo Hoo!!!
ReplyDelete