Day 23: Tidal Wave! — MakingMiles

November 2nd, 2019

Kilometers: 516.2-548.7

Puhoi to Stillwater Holiday Park

I think we all slept pretty well last night for the first time in a few nights, our afternoon at the pub may have helped with that.

Despite eating a lot yesterday, we all woke up starving. Alex went over to the cafe and got a muffin and an orange for breakfast while I was packing up my gear.

Once I was ready, I headed over and picked up a chocolate milk and a lemon pastry after eating two breakfast bars.

With tides being low, the Puhoi River was not passable by kayak so walking the highway detour was our only option.

Phillip had made friends with a man with a camper who offered to give two of us a hitch to avoid the two kilometer walk along the highway.

Phillip and Peter decided to go and take Charlie’s pack with them. We then set off for the highway to meet them in Waiwera.

The walk along the highway was relatively quick as we were able to walk along the other side of a metal barrier for most of the walk.

After the two kilometers, we turned off onto Hibiscus Highway which would take us back to the coast.

We met back up with the trail right before we crossed the bridge to Waiwera.

Considering that it had taken us an hour and a half to get to Waiwera, we had been expecting them to be waiting for us, but they were nowhere to be found. Our assumption was that the person they hitched with offered to drive them further down the trail. Charlie had left his phone in his pack and neither Alex or myself had Phillip’s phone number so there was no way to contact them.

We decided our best bet was to continue along the trail. The next section of the trail was a rock scramble around the cove which guthook said wasn’t possible during high tide. With high tide just two hours away, Alex and Charlie thought we were fine to chance it.

The scramble started off fine but after a few hundred meters, we found ourselves against a rock face where there was no choice but to get wet. With water calf deep, Alex and Charlie scurried past and made it to the beach without getting overly wet. As I made the same trek, a waist high wave came. I swear it was like watching it come to me in slow motion as the wave drenched me, then hit the rock wall behind me, and cascaded and drenched me yet again. I was soaked from head to toe.

Alex and Charlie watched from the beach laughing their tails off. I slowly got to the beach, already being as wet as I possibly could be, and demanded we go up to the road.

The hike up to the road was through deep brush and took a huge amount of effort just to climb 100 meters. We found ourselves on someone’s property accidentally and had to jump a fence to get back to the road. By the time we got back there, I had started to dry off and started to think it was pretty funny myself.
We followed the highway all the way to the beach town of Orewa. Once the town was in sight, we finally got word from Phillip and Peter that they had been dropped off almost a full kilometer away from Waiwera before we rejoined with the trail. From the Orewa viewpoint, we told them to hitch to a restaurant where we would wait for them.

We stopped for lunch at Ship and Anchor just a block from the beach where Alex and I both got steak and eggs. It was great to have a real steak again. Phillip and Peter met back up with us and we were back as a group again.

Alex and I were still hungry after our meal so we went to a bakery where I got an apple tart and Alex got a meat pie and a raspberry tart.

We are finding that the further we go, the hungrier we are. The meals which were enough for us the first week or two no longer fill us as much as they used to. We will need to adjust our meals at our next resupply to account for this.

The remaining 15 kilometers to camp started along the beach park in Orewa and a bike path.

We met back up with a highway which we would have to walk by for the last 11 kilometers. There was almost no shoulder for most of the way causing us to have to routinely switch sides of the road to avoid blind spots for drivers.

The road to camp had few good views as it was mostly surrounded by dense brush. Finally, around 4:30pm, we arrived at the Stillwater Holiday Park. The owners are notorious for loving TA Hikers and we were able to sleep in their hiker hall and get showers free of charge. We watched the single channel that the TV got for a few hours before making dinner.

We had pasta with beef bourgogne sauce and salami. We had snacked a bit once we got to camp so we were unable to finish all of the giant meal.

We did dishes and got our things together right after dinner as we knew tomorrow would be an early day. We have our alarms set for 5:35am as we need to cross the river in Okura at low tide, which happens to be at 6:35am. Even at low tide, the river can be up to the mid chest. Waking up tomorrow will be nice though as it also means we will get back to Auckland earlier in the day. It’s almost surreal to think that on Day 24, we will have walked over 580 kilometers back to where our journey began. While not a major accomplishment compared to the rest of the TA, getting back there feels like a big accomplishment to me.

-Ethan