Te Araroa – A Skittle’s Journey Through NZ

A Brutal Beginning – Ninety Mile Beach – Day 1-5

I’d been warned before starting the Te Araroa (aka. The TA) that it had one of the roughest beginnings of any thru-hike around. One of my first friends on the trail was a triple-crowner from the US and he had said that the trails in the US had the luxury of being able to walk as far as you wanted before you stopped for the day. So, when you start out with a heavy backpack and fresh legs, you can walk 10km and stop for the day and keep up the schedule for a couple weeks until you’re ready to increase.

The TA is not as kind.

There are specific campsites that you need to walk to on Ninety Mile Beach unless you plan on bush-bashing off trail to find a sneaky cowboy camp (there aren’t really any options for this, by the way). So, your first few days of the trail are 12km, 28km, 30km and 32km.

If you’re anything like me, jumping straight into a week of massive walking days on a sandy beach with a too-full backpack is not a walk on the beach (pun intended). It took less than two days to realise that everyone’s warning about this brutal start to the TA were warranted.

I’d even been told that a lot of people quit after the beach.

That seemed dramatic when I started.

Day one was beautiful and we were so excited to finally be on our way, that we didn’t really focus on how boring beach walking can be. We arrived at Twilight Beach camp and fell into the sweet rhythm of evening talks with our fellow companions.

But halfway into day two, I was empathetic towards the people who quit early on.

My friend and I had an added brutality to our first few days in the form of a 40km/hr headwind. Every step we took, we were being pushed back a step and for hours and hours, it felt like we were going nowhere. Not to mention that the beach stretched on into the horizon and the landscape never seemed to change.

By the morning of day 3, I had an epic sunburn, ten blisters, wet shoes, a sore back and a fracturing resolve.

I was going to quit.

This was a terrible idea. I couldn’t even survive two days of hiking, how was I meant to make it another 120? We hadn’t even made it to the 50km mark and I still had 3000km to go.

Looking back, it’s funny because I remember feeling so isolated in these thoughts—like I was the only one struggling. This definitely wasn’t true, since I was hiking with my friend Stacey and she was voicing her own struggles to me as well. But we’d started in a group of fourteen and everyone else seemed better equipped and more experienced. Their backpacks were lighter and they were SO much faster.

At the end of day 3, the wind caught my lucky hat and almost blew it out into the ocean. I burst into tears. By the time we got into Hukatere Lodge that night, everyone else had been there for an hour or longer and I was destroyed. Stacey and I splurged and booked some beds and had a shower. Everyone was so kind and congratulated us on a hard day’s hike, but I kept thinking that they were pitying us. Surely they could see that I wasn’t going to make it, right? They were just being nice because they knew I was going to quit.

How wrong I was.

It didn’t take long to discover that everyone was harbouring blisters and new aches and pains. Even a few people who had just finished hiking the PCT and had jumped straight onto the TA were talking about how sore they were.

It’s safe to say that this was the boost I needed in my morale.

Still, we had another 32km day to go and I couldn’t imagine walking another 10km.

But then someone mentioned that there was a small township between Hukatere and Ahipara where you could break up the beach walk. Most people were going to push on so they could be done with the horrendous Ninety Mile Beach (which we had dubbed Ninety Mile Bitch). But for Stacey and I, another day on the beach wasn’t so bad if we could stop halfway and soak our aching muscles under a hot shower.

We started day 4 of the trail with more vigour.

Knowing we only had to hike 17km filled me with such overwhelming joy that I practically ran those kilometers. I’d spent the previous days listening to Dungeons & Daddies (a DnD podcast on Spotify) and had found it a pleasing distraction from my thoughts, but on day 4, I walked alongside Stacey without any music or podcasts. We chatted about life and what was coming next. For the first time, I could see myself walking longer than the beach.

When we arrived at Waipapakauri in the early afternoon, we encountered a surprise. Three of the other hikers had decided to go for a half day. The five of us made ourselves at home at the holiday park and relaxed.

I think this was the first time on the trail that I felt the community spirit of thru-hiking. There is a special type of connection you make with people when you do something intense and crazy. My friend Stacey calls it ‘trauma-bonding’. And it’s so true! The people I met from those early days… we share a connection from Ninety Mile Beach because of how hard and emotional it was. We all made a decision to take months off from our lives to hike and test ourselves and in those first days, you’re coming to terms with how real and difficult this is going to be. When Stacey and I met other people on the South Island of NZ, we still connected with them, but it was different to the early connections.

When you start that journey together, it bonds you in such a visceral way.

On day 5, Stacey and I left late and walked the last 15km to Ahipara. Hitting tarmac was surreal after walking on sand for so many days. I think we were so excited to walk on a road that we forgot to celebrate hitting 100km. We were also motivated to get to the fish & chip shop. We both ordered burgers and inhaled them before contemplating what would be a trail-defining decision.

For those of you who don’t know, there is A LOT of road-walking on the TA. People estimate that between 30-40% of the trail is on roads. And the first one we encountered was from Ahipara to Kaitaia. It’s about 20km along a highway.

Purists (a special breed of hiker) will not question this and will immediately start the harrowing road-walk. Stacey and I, however, were fairly certain that whilst we would walk most of the roads (which we did), we knew we weren’t purists. And so we stuck our thumbs out and hitched into Kaitaia.

If anyone is curious, hitching culture in NZ in unparalleled. During our whole time on the TA, we must’ve hitched over 60 times and we always had a wonderful time. Of course, some people have horror stories, but for us, it was a really fun and convenient way to get around the country when we needed to go resupply or wanted to skip a dodgy section of road-walking.

When we arrived in Kaitaia, it felt like we’d done something incredible. We arrived at the backpackers with a bunch of our new friends (most of whom had decided to skip the road-walk as well) and we were all celebrating a job well done. We’d survived the first hurdle and we hadn’t quit. That was the hardest part done.

At least, that’s what we thought at the time.

Spoiler: we were naive AF.