Packing the Packs

By Ruth

Tonight is our last night in the lap of Aucklander luxury before we head up north. Over the past few days we’ve been stocking up on food and the last few supplies we needed, and we are now packing up our bags for the start of the trail. I thought this would be a good opportunity to give you a bit of insight into what is going to be in our packs when we start walking on Monday.

Gear

Above is a picture of all the gear we packed in Vancouver. You can see we each have a small pile of clothes, sleeping bag, mat, poles, some eating/drinking utensils, electronics (we each are bringing a phone and an e-reader), toiletries, travel documents, as well as a tent to share. It looks like a lot but packs up quite compactly – here we are with everything at YVR departures:

Food

The first section of trail is actually one of the longer ones without an easy re-supply. We are packing what we expect to be food for 4 nights, but since we don’t really know how hungry we’ll be or how satisfying some of our food choices will be, this first leg might end up being a bit of an experiment to help us calibrate how much food we really should be bringing per night on the trail. Of course since we’re carrying everything on our backs, we don’t want to bring too much. But, for the same reason, we don’t want to bring too little and run out of energy to carry the packs! A real optimization problem… good thing we are both engineers.

Here is what we are bringing:

The last couple of pieces of gear we picked up here in Auckland were a gas canister – because you can’t bring those on the plane – and pack liners. Pack liners seem to be one of those hiking culture differences between NZ and Canada. In our experience, the way people tend to prepare for wet conditions back home is to get a waterproof cover for their pack, and maybe a smaller waterproof stuff sack for their sleeping bag and any other vital things, and that usually works fairly well to keep everything dry-ish. Over here, the thing to do is get a pack liner: essentially a big, sturdy garbage bag that goes inside your pack, and everything else goes inside that. You roll down the top, and then you could be chest deep in a river before your things start getting wet. We wanted to do things the proper Kiwi way, but the outdoor stores in Canada don’t even sell pack liners! Luckily the store we went to a couple days ago had several options and we easily managed to get them here.

Now we are truly ready to tramp!

(Disclaimer: above is not the recommended way to use a pack liner.)

EFIs

By Elliot

Yesterday was spent wandering around Auckland, picking up some last minute supplies and scouting out potential camping meal options at the grocery store.

We found ourselves at an outdoor gear store to pick up pack liners, cooking gas and some dehydrated meals. The girl who worked there asked us if we were doing the TA. When we answered yes, she said that she did it last year and it’s so amazing. That we would love it, and when I expressed nervousness she said it would be fine.

My immediate thought when she mentioned she’d done the trail was: here stands someone who is both physically and emotionally stronger than me. This girl is a superhuman, who’d walked thousands of kilometres through all kinds of forbidding weather and remained excited by the prospect of other people doing the same. How does she know that it will be fine for me? I’m not exactly from hardy stock. I’ve already started kvetching and haven’t even begun the trail.

There are two kinds of trail walkers: efi and non-efi, efi standing for Every Fucking Inch. Most people start as efi hikers but eventually reality sets in and people hike their own hike. Only a hardcore few remain. I was never an efi hiker, and the more time goes by that I haven’t started, the fewer the inches I seem to plan to walk. The section of trail for the first day of has been eroded by rain. Will I walk that section on road instead? Of course not! My start will be where the second day’s section of trail begins. 5km of roadside walking next to a highway? I think I’ll hitchhike that section. The approximately 1000km from Auckland to Wellington? Seems like it will be repetitive: maybe there are some sections to skip.

Luckily, we start walking on Monday. Any more time than that and I might find myself calling the trail done without walking a single inch.

Despite all my meshugaas, I am genuinely excited to start walking the trail, meeting fellow thru-hikers and seeing New Zealand.

Possum Land

By Ruth

As hiking and camping enthusiasts in Canada, one of the big concerns we have to deal with when heading out on an overnight trip is bears. There are strict protocols in place for how to cook and store your food in order to avoid attracting bears to your tent at night. If you’re at an organized backcountry campsite, there will usually be some infrastructure in place for this purpose; like bear-proof lockers or a pulley system to hang your food well above ground level. Sometimes, we head a bit further afield and have to rig up our own system using a tree, a stuff sack and some rope. All the diagrams you see for how to do this online show a perfect tree, with a nice strong branch extending perpendicularly from the trunk, where you can suspend your food bag high above the ground and a safe distance from the tree trunk, so in case the bear climbs up, it still won’t be able to reach your provisions. In reality though, this platonically ideal tree does not exist. We usually end up with a janky bear hang, a bit too low and close to surrounding tree trunks. In the morning, there is a small moment of relief when we see the food is still there.

Now that we are in New Zealand, we don’t have to worry about bears at all. It is a big mindset shift which has left us with the question: if we don’t have to make a bear hang, what should we do with our food at night? But it seems our days of stashing or hanging food are not quite behind us, because here there is another type of wildlife that we have been warned about on several occasions: possums. They are apparently aggressive and will go after your food if you leave it unattended. So while there is less threat to life and limb from these creatures, we will still want to make sure our food is safe from their little marsupial paws, and hanging is a good way to do that.

While I was adequately warned about possums before coming here, I didn’t expect to see any possums this early in our trip. But while we are still in Auckland, they have been popping up everywhere.

This newspaper article:

This shop window:

These local New Zealand wool blend yarns (yes, we did take the opportunity to have a look around a local yarn store):

It seems as though there is a full-on anti-possum war being waged down here, and no one is talking about it.

Letting go and Looking ahead

By Elliot

We just landed in Auckland this morning. With a 14-hour overnight flight and some jet lag, we are both exhausted. Ruth is “resting her eyeballs for a little bit” (her words, not mine) as we sit at a picnic bench on the quay. We want to check in to our hotel, but our flight landed before 6am, and check in is normally not until 3pm, so we have some time to fill.

The day before our flight to Auckland was Moving Day. We gave up our lease and put all our stuff in storage. I believe that we are technically homeless now.

It took half a day for us to move everything out of our little laneway house and into storage. Half a day for our home to turn into an empty house, devoid of the all memories we made there (such as the many hours we spent on the couch knitting).

Whenever there is a last of something, I always yearn to capture the essence of the moment. The last day of my job. The last day we lived in Israel. The last morning I woke up in my bed in my laneway house. But no matter how much I try to bring awareness to those moments, the truth is that they fade from memory so fast. Things that seem significant at the time quickly become unimportant in hindsight.

Before we left Vancouver we discussed our trip with many people, and one thing I understood from our conversations is that New Zealand is shrouded in mystery. People in Canada have friends and cousins that live in New Zealand, but know very little beyond that in terms of their whereabouts. When we were making changes to our car insurance, the lady helping us told us an aunt of hers lives in New Zealand. Where, I asked. She didn’t know: but she moved from the Philippines with her wife. Someone else told us they have a cousin in New Zealand. Where, I asked. Again, they didn’t know, but they knew that their cousin was into disc golf.

In short, all I currently know about New Zealand is that there is a Filipina woman living here with her wife, and at least one person who likes disc golf. I’m looking forward to learning more about the country and its people.

Welcome

By Ruth

Here you are at the start of our New Zealand blog. Welcome. If you are reading this, that means you have encouraged us to set out on this adventure, supported us when we talked about it, or otherwise shown the slightest interest in the trip we are about to take. For that we’d like to say, thank you!

Now that you’re here, you might have some questions, which I will try to address below.

what are you doing?

Great question. We are taking 6 months off of work, flying down to New Zealand, and walking a through-hike route known as the Te Araroa (TA). This route traverses 3000 km along the length of both main islands of New Zealand. We will start towards the end of October and aim to finish in 4-6 months.

Why is this blog called the woolly wanderers?

Woolly - because we love wool. Seriously, we are both big knitters, for reference, please check out my page on Ravelry. Also, New Zealand is known to have a lot of sheep. Since we will be walking several thousand kilometers in New Zealand, we imagine we may encounter a fair few of our woolen friends.

Wanderers - although the TA is a defined route, we are not expecting to complete every footfall. We are setting out to walk the TA but our real goal is wandering along the route to see where it will take us. (Also, alliteration.)

Why are you doing this?

This is the toughest question to answer. There are a few reasons: we want a break from work, we want a challenge, we love hiking and being outdoors, we want to enter a new day-to-day that is completely different from the plush comfort of our regular lives, we want to meet interesting people, and we really want to write a blog together and this was the only way we could think of that would give us anything interesting to write about. But as we go along the route I have a feeling we will figure out some new reasons as well.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask in the comments!