Te Araroa Pt. 17

Day 87-89

Made up my mind to return home. Just in time for new year. I will take the ocean channel as a natural boundary.

This has been a trip filled with pain and joy. It is a new way of life, and is definitely a step out of my comfort zone. Dealing with contingencies, setbacks, planning days ahead with poor information... it has been a test of both my physical and mental faculties. In a way I should be proud because my load was heavier than all the others', and I was alone for the most part. Despite skipping a whole lot of the trail, I believe not many purists will remain pure after they put on my pack. This may be just self-comfort, but I know that my loadout is very poorly done and that skipping would have been necessary at one point or another due to my injuries.

I await the opportunity to complete the South Island. By then I would attack it with all the experience and training of an over-encumbered hiker with 1000km under his belt.

Here ends my Te Araroa journey -- for now.

The End

Kind of sad to leave, but I guess it had to happen. I had skipped too much of it due to various reasons and I wanted no more of it. In the future I want to be more prepared for this trail and hope to do it without any major stops.

For example maybe in the pictures you can see how huge my pack it. Although it is cool to have the biggest pack in the room, or to whip out a 1kg pack of bacon (that's nothing, sometimes I have 3kg), it is not very sustainable. I even started out with the maps and notes and a camera tripod.

This shows that I was very unprepared and overconfident. If you read my posts since day 1 you would have known that I indeed felt the effects.

To any others looking to do this, I want to tell you that this is not a joke. You need serious training for this. I trained quite a bit before this, doing day hikes, climbing stairs, long distance running, strength training, but it's all pretty useless, because you can't train for this at all! Certainly those methods help, but unless you can find the time to go out hiking for a month to try it out, you will never be prepared. And I found that out the nasty way. Well, unless you're those ultralight guys who are fine with carrying nothing but their body weight. Then by all means, carry on.

Anyway, it was pretty fun, had a time of my life. It exposed me to lots of things, and I learned many new things during this journey. During my free time I would learn things like tying knots, testing out the plants around me, listening to podcasts, etc. The planning was also pretty educational, trying to guess what was going on under the canopy in topographic maps, planning where to stay, getting yourself un-lost, etc.

10/10 would try again.