I‘ve just finished this short highlights video of the Te Araroa. It’s roughly in chronological order from the Top of the North Island to the bottom of the south, unfortunately I don’t have any footage of us getting to the end due to a memory card malfunction… Song used: Bow Wow by Tommy Bass
Flickr photo set - I’ve edited our mountain of photos down to reasonably easy to flick through 200 photo set of the highlights. And then a slightly longer 1000 odd photo set that covers the trail in a bit more depth.
Here’s the first section of video from our walk across New Zealand, I’ll be uploading the rest as I get them finished. From Cape Reinga at the top of the North Island we walked down 90 Mile Beach, across to the east coast via the Herekino and Raetea forests, along the Bay of Islands and then through the Russell Forest.
Don’t listen to what the sign says, we’re not taking the as-the-crow-flies route ;)
Bluff is the southernmost tip of New Zealand which hopefully we’ll be reaching before our tourist visa runs out, just shy of 6 months time!
This is an old lava flow that we’re walking along, apparently the top end of New Zealand used to be a separate volcanic island which has been joined onto the north island by the ocean currents pushing sand up the coast. There’s certainly plenty of sand about.. Gets everywhere! 
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.
5th day of walking now. I was finding it pretty hard. Really tricky navigating on this stretch of beach as there were no clear landmarks to tell you how far you’d come or very accurately where you were. We were hoping not to miss a nook in the relentless sand dunes that might have taken us up to the campsite and water tap we were in fair need of.
Utea Park is a new campsite, just opened this year, it totally exceeded our expectations! Massive communal living room with sofas and dinning table, even electricity for charging our gadgets, and most importantly running water.
