By Elliot
Distance: 18km
The weather cooperated with us today. We managed to get blue skies for a good portion of the day, and no rain. And we got to appreciate the “grand vistas” promised in the trail notes, even though the description is a bit of an exaggeration, which was doubly disappointing as we haven’t had any good viewpoints in over 3 weeks. But I’m sure the views will come soon enough.
We thought today might be long, so we were on the trail at 7am. Today’s trail was really nice, in a beautiful forest. At first there was some mud, but it didn’t bother me and I found ways around it. But eventually, I realized it had been several hours and almost every bit of trail I was walking on was muddy, and I was tired of the mud.
But a snack break managed to revive my spirits, and I powered through, all the way to the stream crossings. So many stream crossings.
We tried our best to keep our feet dry, but by the end of the day, we both had wet feet from missteps in the streams.
We arrived at camp at around 3:30pm, the day ending up taking less time than we thought. Our one remaining concern of the day was whether our grocery delivered would arrive. We ordered groceries a few days ago in Palmy to be delivered at this campsite. Luckily, the New World supermarket chain has their logistics under control and we got our groceries.
Another thing we did upon arriving to camp was check the weather, as we finally had internet. The next section of trail is three days through mountains, so it’s important for us to have good weather. Which, it looks like we won’t, with heavy rain and high wind expected on Friday. And then rain expected for Saturday as well.
So we are left with several options, none of which we like. One option is to push through and not pay attention to the weather. Another option is to make use of the extra day’s worth of food we have and wait out Friday in a hut, after walking tomorrow. But we would still have rain Saturday and Sunday, and potentially swollen streams which are less safe to cross. We can get a ride into Levin and wait out the worst of the weather: this would also mean giving up tomorrow, which is supposed to have great weather, as a walking day. The last option is to get a ride into Levin and then skip this section of trail entirely. But we were really looking forward to this section.
We are currently leaning towards waiting things out in Levin, but will check the weather forecast again tomorrow morning in case something changes for the better. We are both very frustrated as we want to keep going and get into the mountains. But as we need to remind ourselves, our goal is to enjoy the trail, and having a three day section through mountains with potentially unsafe conditions some of the time and unpleasant conditions at other times is not enjoyment.