Last Monday, and probably every other day, a local shopkeeper saw a group of people hobbling gingerly through her West Coast town of Karamea at a glacially slow pace. Each and every joint that moved was accompanied by a corresponding wince and/or whimper emanating from its owner.
“No prizes for guessing where we’ve just come from!” one group member remarked. “Nope” said the shopkeeper. “I know the Heaphy Shuffle when I see it!”
Day One – Brown Hut to Perry Saddle Hut (17.5km)
The van picked us up from our Nelson accommodation at 7am. I was calm. I’d prepared for what was to come. I’d done countless training walks, some in my tramping boots in order to break them in, some with a fully laden pack on my back in order to get used to shouldering the burden, some uphill, some flat, some as long as the longest day ahead of me, some all of the above.
“I’m really looking forward to picking you up at the other end” the van driver chirped. “The Heaphy changes people. You will come out the other end a different person. I can’t wait to see how it changes you.” I wondered if or how her words would ring true in five days’ time.
We arrived at the starting gate, Brown Hut, a little before lunchtime. Ahead of us was a 6 hour climb to Perry Saddle via Flanagan’s Corner – at 915m above sea level, the highest point on the track. That meant this would surely be our toughest day’s work. If we could survive this, the rest would be a breeze!
With that in mind, I resolved to put my head down and get this over with as quickly as possible. With headphones on and Lynyrd Skynyrd setting the tempo, I took off through the forest of podocarp and beech, barely looking up from the task at hand.
After about 9km I started feeling a little weak so I decided to stop, eat a muesli bar and rest on a log until some of the others from my group arrived. I waited a good 20 minutes before one of our guides rounded the corner and exclaimed “there you are! I’ve been trying to catch up to you for ages! We were supposed to stop for lunch a couple of km back!” Ooops. I guess I got a little bit carried away…
From that point on I started to seriously question a couple of my life choices. Chief amongst them was my roaring start. My energy was largely gone and suddenly the relatively gentle gradient we’d been scaling all day started to feel like a sheer cliff face. Secondly, I was wondering how much I would live to regret lugging my 1kg camera and its accompanying 1.5kg birding lens up this mountain…
Not only was my load heavy but there was also the small matter of the weather – persistent rain was falling and I wasn’t 100% confident the inside of my pack would be staying dry enough for its most precious cargo to survive for the astrophotography course I had booked in for the night after I got back to Auckland as a prematurely arranged reward for an achievement I may have been taking a tiny bit for granted…
Was the couple of bird shots I might get over the next few days going to be worth all the stress and toil they were causing?
By the 13km mark my legs were screaming “no no no nooooo what are you thinkinggg????” I was wondering how on earth I was going to make it through the day let alone the whole walk. The only thing keeping me going was a sobering piece of knowledge gained from Guide Tom. I’d politely enquired about the procedure for calling the rescue helicopter only for him to dryly advise “I don’t think they’d be too happy if we called them just because you’re tired.” I got the message. There was literally no option other than to keep walking until I got there. This was strangely comforting.
Eventually I got there. The first thing I did upon my arrival at Perry Saddle Hut was not flop onto a bunk. It was get my camera out to see how it had feared. The lens and mirror were fogged up but after a bit of time close to the fireplace it seemed to have come right…
Day Two – Perry Saddle Hut to Saxon Hut (12.4km)
After a reasonable night’s sleep (considering the whiffy bunk room full of snorers) and a leisurely porridge breakfast, I was feeling ready to take on another day. This one was set to be shortish, largely flat, and it presented some of my favourite scenery of the whole trip. The Gouland Downs are spectacular. You emerge from the beech forest out into wide open tussock covered spaces that stretch as far as the eye can see, occasionally broken up by the odd stream and at the halfway point there’s a compact little ‘enchanted forest’ growing out of a random limestone deposit complete with caves and waterfalls.
Wekas and robins keep you company as you stroll along – neither have any fear of humans and will come very close in their quest to encourage you along the way (I’m sure it’s not to scavenge food) and the weather was pretty good. It only decided to start raining at the precise moment we arrived at our accommodation for the evening.
It was set to be a cold night, we heard tales of snow back at Perry Saddle, and Saxon Hut is one of the older huts on the track. While other huts we stayed at were relatively new and featured double glazed windows, this one had noticeable gaps between the windows and frames where cold air was rushing in. I found myself shivering quite badly. Adding layers wasn’t helping so I climbed into my sleeping bag. That didn’t help either.
Sitting at the dining table another member of our group started reading out a pamphlet that described the symptoms of hypothermia. As she rattled through them I ticked them off in my head one by one and it suddenly dawned on me that I should probably be taking this kinda seriously. When she put the pamphlet down I picked it straight up and skimmed ahead to remedies. Step one was make a hot chocolate. Step two was for someone to get into your sleeping bag with you. I was keen to avoid step two so I made a hot chocolate and sat by the fire. Thankfully it seemed to work.
The moral of the story was eat more snacks out on the track. I’d been given a big pack of them, which I’d barely touched. Big mistake. You need to keep your sugar intake high even when you’re not feeling hungry.
Day Three – Saxon Hut to James Mackay Hut (11.8km)
The next day was rainy but it was set to be our shortest of the trip – we were due at our destination by lunch time with an entire afternoon set aside for us to relax and put our feet up. But my trials to date had given me pause for thought. Did I really want to approach all five days with a “let’s get this over with” attitude? Or was I here to fully experience the Heaphy Track and at least try to enjoy myself?
I decided that failure today would be arriving at James Mackay Hut before anyone else in our group. I wanted to be last, or close to it. So after donning my wet weather gear and making sure my camera was buried deep inside my pack I made sure I was last to set off. Then when I caught up to the tail of the group I made a conscious decision not to pass anyone.
I ended up spending the whole morning walking and chatting with a Nelson couple who were celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary on the track that very day. We stopped for lots of rests and every time we did we found something around us to admire – a crop of fungi or moss, a view, a tree, a waterfall, the sound of a bird or of rushing water. Not a single negative word was uttered and it was fantastic. One of my companions remarked that even if she wanted to think about her job she couldn’t. I tried it myself and she was absolutely right – any thoughts of work or other problems were immediately pushed aside by the present. It was impossible to be drawn out of the world we were in.
Two thirds of the way in we came to a beautiful bridge that punctuated a snaking path around and over a gushing stream. It was the perfect spot for a commemorative anniversary photo. The happy couple asked me to take it with their cell phone but I had a better idea. Despite the rain I dug deep into my pack and got my camera out. The result was a real hit and not only did I now know why I had brought my camera on the trip, but I was also happy in the knowledge that it had been absolutely worth it.
Day Four – James Mackay Hut to Heaphy Hut (20.5km)
On day four it rained hard for the longest day of our tramp in terms of distance covered, but mercifully it was mostly downhill. The first half was a long and uneventful trudge down to the near sea level Lewis Hut where lunch awaited our sodden carcasses.
I had completed the descent solo but planned to repeat yesterday’s experience enrichment strategy for the second leg that would see us following the banks of the Heaphy River all the way to its mouth on the West Coast. While hanging back waiting for the others to get a head start, Pat the Department of Conservation Ranger who we’d met at James Mackay the previous night, burst in through the back door…
“35 years I’ve been doing this! 35 years! And I just saw my first ever daytime kiwi!!” He’d been walking down the exact same piece of track I’d been trudging uneventfully down only minutes earlier when a kiwi had literally fallen out of the bush, rolled around at his feet, picked itself up then gone for a peck in the mud along the track in front of him. Pat said “I talked to him in English and I talked to him in kiwi but he just ignored me and kept feeding along the track. I’m absolutely buzzing!”
What a difference a few minutes can make. If I’d been taking things a bit slower maybe I too could have had that once in a lifetime experience…
But on with the plan!
One of the benefits of being on a guided tour is there is always a guide bringing up the rear making sure nobody gets left behind. This not only ensures that you don’t… you know… die… it also means if you’re the last straggler there is always someone knowledgeable to talk to. The guides were full of interesting information from identifying plants and birds right through to answering life’s eternal questions such as “how far nowwww??”
They also proved great at drawing your attention to stuff you would have completely missed without them. For example, about 1.5km out from Heaphy Hut we passed a small tree set slightly back from the track that I wouldn’t have looked at twice if nobody had said anything. But Tom wasn’t having that: “hey check out the shags!”
My jaw dropped. The tree had not one but five nests in it, each containing at least one shag – there seemed to be a mixture of parents and juveniles, all just chilling out in the downpour. “You’ve got to get your camera out for this” exclaimed Tom! I hesitated. It was really seriously raining. Getting my camera out involved opening my pack and getting not just my camera wet but everything that was protecting it would be soaked as well. He was right though. I wasn’t lugging the damn thing 80km to leave it in my bag when opportunities like this presented themselves.
So out it came. And it was worth it.
Day Five – Heaphy Hut to Kohaihai (16.2km)
I have a book entitled ‘Walking in the Waitakeres’ – it describes all the walking tracks in Auckland’s West and rates their levels of difficulty. My wife and I have a running joke we like to share based on its use of the word “undulating”. When the book describes a track as undulating, what it means to say is “you will be scaling and then repelling a slope akin to the North Face of K2.”
All the elevation maps of the Heaphy Hut to Kohaihai section of the Heaphy Track show a flat walk. Don’t be deceived. It’s a barefaced lie. It ain’t flat. It’s undulating.
It probably didn’t help that it was my fifth straight day of walking and I didn’t have a single dry piece of clothing in my posession. It was a beautiful sunny day and the scenery was incredible as we followed the coast through millions of glorious nikau palms and massive rata trees. It’s not hard to see why this is rated as one of New Zealand’s finest day walks. But I seriously struggled to appreciate this as by the halfway stage a combination of debilitating fatigue and excruciatingly angry thigh chafing made every step a living hell.
The highlight of the day unquestionably came right near the end when a rare whio made an appearance in the river below me, merrily diving for lunch amongst the rocks. This was so cool that it even made me turn around and walk back UP the track to get a better view. Unfortunately we were running behind schedule for the day – there were fresh whitebait fritters waiting for us in Karamea and they weren’t going to eat themselves. If I’d had more time I would have clambered down to the river bed, chafing and all, to get a decent angle for a photo. As it was I had to content myself with the memory in my head.
When I finally emerged into the picnic area that marked the end of our journey, I shed my pack and collapsed in a heap. I was exhausted but enormously satisfied with what I had achieved.
Did it change me? Maybe. I think most of all it was a welcome reset – a period of time where the outside world had no relevance whatsoever, which allowed me to mentally re-enter it on my own terms.
Before tackling the Heaphy I wanted to tick off all of New Zealand’s ‘Great Walks’ one by one. I’m not sure if I still harbour that ambition but there is one other I am definitely planning to do as soon as I can – Stewart Island’s Rakiura Track, which will present another chance to see kiwi and other rare native birds. But maybe, before that, a three day itinerary – Kohaihai to Heaphy Hut, a whole day with those shags, and maybe some quality whio time on the way back.
This will be possible because my camera survived its five day ordeal in good working order and aside from a very ginger walk out to the gannet colony and back from Muriwai’s upper car park the reward for my Heaphy achievement was well worth the struggle to earn it…
The Fox and the Crow 