On Boxing Day in 2023, journalist and author Naomi Arnold left Bluff and spent the next nine months walking the 3000km length of New Zealand. In this extract from her book about the journey, Northbound, she describes a long day and a scary night.
Photos: Naomi Arnold (not included in the book)
I walked my longest-ever day, more than 40km, on the flat between Lake Ōhau Lodge and Twizel. It was hot, dusty, dry, windy. Around 10am a pack of grim-looking young southbound women strode past, strung out along the lakeside trail. When I stopped to eat some beef jerky, another southbound hiker told me that the group had just about completed a 100km stretch that would finish at the lodge. They’d been walking all night. I was aghast.
Ten hours later I arrived in Twizel hobbling, leaning on my poles, my hips and feet throbbing, tears in my eyes from the pain. Al, a friend of a friend, picked me up and took me back to his house, and fried me up some fresh trout he’d caught, served with potato pom-poms and a lettuce and tomato salad. The first snow had fallen on the Southern Alps when I set off for Takapō two nights later.
After so many days in the sun I wanted to spend some time walking under the stars, and this flat, 54km trek was the perfect chance to soak up the universe. Most walkers cycled it, but I was still stuck on my Every F***ing Inch goal. Inspired by the group of young southbound women, I decided to also walk through the night, just to see how far I could go before I collapsed.
I stoked up on a treat of eggs Benedict for breakfast, then left Twizel at midday and walked through dry plains dotted with wilding pines, the fresh, blue-white Alps like jagged teeth on the horizon. Everyone I passed was delighted by the snowfall.
I walked to the edge of Lake Pukaki, where I joined groups of tourists at picnic tables eating fresh sashimi made from salmon farmed in the glacial canals. I walked around the head of the turquoise lake, scaring hares that ran between dead, rustling stalks of lupins. The poplars were turning yellow and the rosehips bowed over, heavy with bright, deep red fruit. A wasp flew into my cheek like a thrown stone.
My shadow lengthened and someone in a car threw a bottle at me. As the hours ticked past I watched shadows play on snowclad Aoraki, the great ancestor’s facets changing as the sun crept across the sky. As night fell around 8.15pm the trail had turned into farm track, and the maunga was suddenly enormous, glowing pink in front of me in the last of the light.
But as the darkness settled in, I felt again the familiar tug of fear, and my mind began to run worst-case scenarios. Someone was following me, waiting to pounce. This was a bad idea. Why would you put yourself in this situation? This is actually f***ing irresponsible. No one would be sympathetic if you got attacked out here. It would be your fault. You should be safe inside. Why did you need to do this?
There was only one legal campsite in this section, and it was far back behind me. It was 9pm; I’d walked 26km that afternoon and had 30km left to walk to the holiday park in Takapō. There was nobody around. I hoped there was nobody around. Then I glanced at the map on my phone and realised I was way off trail and had been since 7p.m. Kilometres off; I’d mindlessly walked down the wrong farm track, and my phone was nearly out of power. I realised I’d forgotten to charge my battery packs in Twizel.
I zoomed out on the map and saw the nearest place to rejoin the trail was the road running alongside the hydro canal, on private land owned by Meridian Energy. It was too dark to see the ground underfoot and the canal was bound to be fenced; I’d have to backtrack with a dying phone. F***. I felt my last nerve twang, and called Doug.
‘You’re walking through the night?’ he said. He was watching me on the GPS.
‘I’m scared,’ I said. ‘I’m out here alone and what if someone is hunting me down?’
‘None of those munters are going to be out there in the middle of nowhere looking for people,’ he said.
‘I’m lost,’ I said. ‘It’s dark and I went down the wrong farm track and I’m off trail and my phone is dying.’
‘I can see where you are,’ he said. ‘I can see the canal. Can you see Matariki and Orion?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you see Taurus?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s due north right now. Just keep heading towards that.’
‘There’s no track.’
‘Just go towards the start of the canal, it’s all farmland out there. Do you remember how to find your way using the Magellanic Clouds?’
‘Yes.’
‘There you go. You’ll always know where you are. I’ll stay on the phone.’
I stumbled across the rolling, dry hills, but gasped when dozens of clusters of bright eyes popped out of the dark, caught
in the beam of my head torch. Instinct told me they were wolves, watching me pass through their lands.
‘There are eyes out there. What animal has green eyes in the dark?’
‘Sheep.’
Talking made me relax, and Doug and I chatted for an hour and a half as he drove home from an evening meeting, brushed his teeth, fed the dog and took him for a walk down the road, talking about home, about nothing. I made it back to the trai and approached the canal gates. I was relieved to see that no cars could get down the canal road, and felt safer, so we said goodbye.
Now that it was pitch black and I was protected behind gates and I could walk freely down the tarmac and gravel without rolling an ankle or losing the trail, I felt glee creeping in, then joy.
The Milky Way stretched overhead and a few meteors flashed across the darkened vault of the sky. Lights of faraway towns glowed on the horizon and the ghostly shapes of the mountains ran ragged to the west and south. It was bitterly cold in the snow-laden wind, and I layered on extra clothing and turned my headlamp off so my eyes could adjust to the dark. There was just enough light that I could see the white lines on the road in front of me, so I followed them, and followed the stars. The canal was a pale ribbon to my left, and I watched starlight reflecting off it as I walked, enjoying the calm of being alone in the dark with only the universe for company.
The moon rose at midnight. A white plastic public toilet loomed out of the darkness to my right, and I decided to take a break for the first time since my Pukaki sashimi at 3pm. The loo was perfect for a rest: spacious and seemingly little used, it was clean, odourless, windproof and had a lockable door. I inflated my sleeping mat and laid it down for a rest.
Six hours later I woke with a start, unlocked the door, and staggered out. It was 6.30am and dawn was starting to redden the horizon. The sky and the white-clad Alps began to glow pink as I followed the calm blue canal, watching large trout undulating in the water, but as I got closer to Takapō each step began to drive shards of pain from my feet to my hips. According to the trail numbers I’d walked 55km from Twizel, though I’d fallen asleep in the middle of it and had no idea how many kilometres my unplanned detour had added. I had a ways to go yet to match the effort of that group of southbound women.
My phone buzzed. My friend Kirsty had sent me a $50 voucher for The Greedy Cow, a café in town, and I quickened my pace, gritting my teeth against the pain. When I got there I dumped my pack beneath a table and drank three glasses of water, then ordered a flat white, a kombucha, a cup of peppermint tea, and a huge slab of French toast with bacon, long slices of caramelised banana, maple syrup, crushed nuts and candied orange, all of it nestled on the plate against a towering pile of softly whipped cream.
Extracted with permission from © Northbound: Four seasons of solitude on Te Araroa, by Naomi Arnold (Published by HarperCollins Aotearoa NZ).
