We still haven’t found any grass to camp on yet.. Camped tonight behind the beach in the sand dunes, picked this spot because it was slightly damp to give the tent pegs something firmer to stick into! We camped near and filled our boots with water from Te Paki Stream, water tasted good, but a bit worrying that the the stream also doubles up as a road for all the fisherman and tour buses..
Walking, sand, sea, beach, walking, sand, sea, beach, some shells, maybe a dead fish if you’re lucky, walking, sand, sea, beach..My apologies to the squeamish, but I’ve never found a whole flipping’ shark on a beach before, had to post the picture! I suppose that answers our question about are there any sharks in New Zealand?!Other things we’ve found on the beach include: Massive green lipped Mussel shells, Starfish, more shells, Stringray, yet more shells, Pufferfish, shells, golf balls, but mostly shells.
We usually carry Meths to cook on with this super lightweight handmade stove. But our first section was actually one of the longest between towns along this immense beach. So to conserve fuel we decided to test out the special inner cone and pegs you use to convert it into a wood burning stove. Worked pretty well! Much faster than boiling up with liquid fuel. Although it gets the pans pretty dirty, it smells amazing cooking on proper fire :)
The stove is a Caldera Ti-Tri by Cascade Designs. It’s made out of a thin sheet of titanium that rolls up into a tube, very light weight. I think the thing I like about this stove the best was the ordering process! Got an email back from the bloke who makes them straight away, he apologised that he was on-trail, in the middle of a hike, but he would make my stove the following week when he was back in his workshop. Felt good to order from, and get it made by a real person.Well this camp doesn’t look much, but I was super glad to find a patch of greenish sand to camp in. It generally means you get less loose sand and therefore less in your mouth, eyes, and hair when you’re trying to eat and dry off ;)
By Day 3 I had been starting to get rather hacked off with being a sticky human shaped lump of sandpaper :) But luckily we’d managed to camp next to a stream that night and get a bit of a wash, so technically by the end of Day 4 here we’re still ‘fresh’ ;)
We found some amazing flowers in this little oasis springing from a ground covering succulent plant. Big fist-sized lillypad-like flowers in pink and yellow. Really beautiful to see bright colours after days of beige ;) Although you can’t complain! Haha
If you look really close up you can see a surfer fella tucked in there in the waves. Couldn’t get too close without getting the boots wet on this shallow slopping beach. But Nilesh we thought of you when we saw these three chaps. There were some sweet waves, and no other humans for miles and miles in either direction. You’d have had tears in your eyes ;)
Hunting for water. Pretty scarce stuff around these parts. And a lot of the streams marked on this map are hard to spot amongst the giant sand dunes. You can’t rely on picking up the water to boil up your evening pasta, so there’s kilos of water to carry. Poor Cookie has most of it on his back and he looks like he’s sweating it out faster than we can fill it up!
Pretty much the same as day 3 ;) Nicky’s right, water is becoming more of an issue, up until The Bluff pretty much every stream marked on the map was running, now some of them are dried up, so you never quite know when you’re next going to find it. We’ve already had to use some questionable sources.
Pretty damp camp last night in the marshy sand dunes, but luckily we were cheered up with a cheeky visit from the Mighty Boosh’s celebrity nut-face, Coconut Joe. ( We trod on his face though by mistake so I think his show biz career might be over… )