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.