3 days into the New Year!

Jan 3^rd

Left Kaikohe after doing a bit of shopping and dumping my tank. I was horrified at the rubbish around the dump station so I grabbed a rubbish bag and with my trusty rubber gloves, managed to pick up a kitchen tidy bag full of rubbish around the dump station. I then off loaded it into the Warehouse car park trash bin.

From there I headed back out of town towards Okaihau but turned off and headed into the wild blue yonder. I was following the GPS and it lead me an interesting trek out towards the Puketi Forest where the Departmentof Conservation has a camp site. It is interesting that pretty much all DOC camps north of Auckland either over the Christmas period or all year, the NZMCA DOC pass does not apply. I can’t wait to get south of Auckland again to make good use of my DOC pass!

It is a lovely little area with loads of walks from 1 hour to 2 days and some mountain biking along forestry/DOC roads.

I set up camp and made some lunch and headed out on the mountain bike. It was pretty good to start off with until the road started to do weird things like go uphill and down dale.

Up hill

Little side track I took for a km or so

A far cry from yesterday’s flat trip along the rail trail. I am not afraid to say that there was a bit of walking took place on the way out! It was also a stunningly beautiful day with the sun streaming down and hot as….

Unfortunately there was not much of a view due to the trees.

The view

NZ bush

I decided to call it a day when there was about 1km to go to the end of the track but there was a pretty decent decent down yet another hill. So I stopped, had a lunch break and headed back. 

Lunch break

What surprised me was that I had badly misjudged the outward half and was very pleasantly surprised at the speed and ease at which I got back. Not to say it was a piece of cake, there was places where the boulders on the road made for a very slow trip down the hill and the loose gravel also slowed things considerably. I was not prepared to risk having to walk back injured if I came a cropper off the bike at speed! Would have been more than a bit of gravel rash.

So a lovely cold shower at the end awaited and oh it was lovely! Heaps of water pressure and such a cool down.

Tomorrow will be a bit of a walking day I think. I will do a couple of hours on the Upper Waipapa Track which is the start of the 2 day tramp and see how I go. I will only take the day pack and if I survive I might go out the following day and camp over up at Camp Creek which is about 5 hours in and then come back. But we will see how I go tomorrow.