Paddy's walk

 

 

 

 

Paddy and I are just back from his "walk", my attempt to provide some sort of rite of passage as he grows older.
The pictures are the wrong way round, so perhaps I should reverse them. Or perhaps I won't and you can cope with the fact that the pictures in this post show the end of the walk, the second show the middle and the third show the start.

We went to the Warawara forest which is north of the Hokianga Harbour about 80 km Sw of Kaitaia. It is a huge conservation forest bordered on the West by the Tasman. Three predominately Maori settlements are found on its edges. Pawerenga to the north, an old Catholic settlement: they say that the only people who go there are those that live there and those that are lost. Panguru is on the East and has a large school that I had some dealings with as a science video-conference teacher a couple of years back. We started our walk from the coastal settlement of Mitimiti. The pictures show us climbing up above this small collection of houses.

The other boy in the pictures is Lance, who is Paddy's friend.

We aimed to walk from Mitimiti up a ridge path to find a vehicle track that runs from Pawerenga right through the forest. The first day's walk was very tough on us all, we climbed 400m through thick bush. There was a track, but it was steep and semi-overgrown. Trees had fallen across it and it took no notice of contours going up and down very steeply. As a consequence, we made slow progress on day one and made it as far as the vehicle track. we set up camp next to the roadway and were careful to stow all our food deep inside rucksacks so as not to attract foraging wild pigs in the night.

I lay awake partly because my back is giving me gyp and partly because I was trying to work out if that rustling noise was a pig, or a possum, or just the wind.

Day 2 Paddy's walk

 

 

 

 

Day two dawned cold and damp. Heavy condensation left us all a bit wet. But thankfully we had no nocturnal porcine encounters.

We were back on the track with a lot of ground to make up on account of our slow first day. We had left word in Mitimiti of our eta and I did not want to cause a Search and Rescue call-out. Fortunately, it was a lot easier walking along a roadway. It meandered round following the contours much more than the walking track. We even found time to take a detour and climb up Maungapuhotu, one of the peaks named on the map. It was supposedly 625m but I actually think that we climbed a neighbouring unnamed smaller peak. Never mind - the view was panoramic and well worth the detour. See pictures of Paddy and Lance posing with the world laid out below them. Paddy gave the view and experience the highest complement, saying that it would be his new facebook profile - let's see if that happens.

The rest of day was a bit of a grind as we walked along the vehicle track almost as far as Pawarenga and then cut off East down, down down to the beach. What a place to spend a night though! A large sandy bay with a meandering stream populated by pied stilts, paradise shellduck and NZ dotterels. The surf pounding away at a safe distance. Huge logs scattered amongst the grass as evidence of decades old storms.

In the morning 2 horse and a foal moved down from the hills to graze near our camp. Paddy was conviced that it was Mongolia!

We had a leisurely breakfast and then struck camp and had a pleasant short walk down the beach back to Mitimiti, our car and then home.

I enjoyed this little sojourn. There is nothing like getting away from it all to put things into perspective. I took no books and wrote little. The boys babbled lots of boy talk to each other, so there was space just to lie and watch the clouds scudding over and let the mind empty of detritus. It occurred to me this morning as I spent 5 minutes cleaning my teeth, that we are expected to mutlitask so much nowadays, to pack in more and more and achieve ever more, that we don't have time to think about half the stuff that we are doing. When was the last time that you actually concentrated fully on brushing your teeth, and were not doing it automatically while you were figuring out what colour to paint the bathroom, or how late you were for leaving the house?

I will stop now before you start thinking that I am having a mid-life moment ... if you know me, you'll know that I have always been having those!