Underestimated the importance of doing this section at absolute low tide this morning.. It’s a pain in the arse when low tide is 6am! The incoming tide blocked our way before we reached the beach and we had to escape through someone’s back garden and up onto the Hibiscus Highway!
Hah! For a moment there I thought you meant I had to…
Hang on, you what?
As we know, I am little endowed with natural climbing talent. So this presented a possible challenge shall we say! But much to my delight, not only were there steps cut for most of the ascent but they’d stuck bars in most of the tricky bits. Thank god! Great for me, but probably a dull climb for climbing fans. But the views were *unbelievable!!* Well worth it.
I’ve come across these before, not sure what they’re actually called, I’ve always known them as ‘staples’ for obvious reasons. There’s quite a few well placed ones round here to help us up the mountain.
Damn it. It was a long hot walk up here and a similar long hot dusty road walk awaited us if decided to head back out of the hills and along to the next township. So we weren’t exactly doubling back but it would be a bit of a ‘scenic route’ for sure! … Well, no Monty Python style lumberjacks came through. There were no sounds of chainsaws either. So doing the sensible thing …. after taking some silly photos of course … we packed up and shipped out. But not to worry! There’s an amazing Owl Prison in the next town to check out… Owl-Capone and Owl-Pacino here we come!
We could either leg it over the fence and try and avoid the loggers who were nowhere to be seen. Or follow Scotts Road out of the hills and walk around to the town of Shannon, where we could get back on the trail beyond the Tokomaru Valley Road blockade.
We chose to abide by the notice and walk around. In the end the decision was made easy by Owlcatraz, a bizarre sounding owl sanctuary located in Shannon, which we’d heard about and Nicky was dying to visit.
The Richmond Range awaited us. The words sound colossal and weighty as I write them now. “The toughest section of the Te Araroa Nicky,” Cookie informs me, “…are you ready?”… I have no idea! I thought to myself. Knowing that was not the required response.
A twinge of butterflies as I write this, we were really going ‘into the wild’ this time..
Even though we cut our day short, we were completely cream crackered by the time we finally arrived at Captains. We spent the next 30 mins flapping the door back and forth with the windows wide open trying to get some fresh air in the hut, a metal tin box sat in the sun all day is like a bloody oven inside..
The next stretch to Roebuck was a bit torturous under our sizable loads. Lots of ups and downs and a exposed narrow track along the valley walls.
“Over the top and just nip down the othe… Ooooh” Pretty steep the far side too eh? But this time some good old fashioned rock climbing. Yey brilliant, I’m shit at this :) Some great tutoring from Cookie however, got me down this vertical wedge of lumpy rock, even though chunks of it were manoeuvred across on my bum cheeks ;) Thank goodness those North Face shorts are made of stern stuff or it’d have been a drafty afternoon in the nether regions.
This was the worst of the rock gullies, an easy scramble, but long & steep enough to scare the crap out of Nicky, I think she might of mentioned the phrase “what the hell am I doing up here” a few times round about this point ;) I decided to ferried our packs down first so that Nicky could climb down unencumbered.
This path is getting exponentially steeper by the minute :) Nico emerged over the rock slab asking if this was really indeed a ‘walking’ holiday, and possibly that it might be considered ‘climbing’? ;) I think he has a point there! There was a lot of gripping with your fingertips and toes and monkey-ing on up there to be done!
