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The journey across to the beginning of The Heaphy Trail was longer than we expected and although we were still recovering from the night before (Debs from Rum and James from food poisoning from the Chinese Buffett) the road was stunning! Especially along The Buller River to Westport. We made to the Koihaihai campsite by 10pm and zonked asleep! We felt wide awake and ready the next morning. Packing the bags with supplies (sleeping bags, water, food, waterproofs etc.) was very stressful due to the sandfly population at the campsite! We had been warned and had pre bought strong deet filled insect repellant but it doesn't seem to do much!
Sandflies are tiny flies that hide away until you go outside then they swarm and sit on your skin and suck your blood, you don't notice until it is too late and you are left with a bite that it he's more as the days go on. They are so small and clever that even if you have trousers and long sleeves on that they will crawl inside! They do however fly slowly so as long as you are moving you are safe!
Once we escaped the sand flies (leaving a swarm of them in the van) we were on our way on the track!
James found out about the track a month before we left in his Dirt magazine (a mountain biking mag) explaining about the track and how they had started to open it up for bikes. Unfortunately it was too late to go on bikes as the season ended in October. What sounded so amazing was the fact that the Heaphy track changed climates and altitude as you went along meaning that the bush and landscape chaned dramatically. As we travelled around the north island lots of locals told us it was well worth doing. We were going to walk the track from one end to the other (a 3-5 day walk) but after doing some research we realised that it would cost a lot of money in huts an to get our van shuttled to the other end. We ended up walking 24k the first day to the Lewis hut. That path was really cool walking along the coast over rivers on long thing swing bridges. The bush changed so much along the way. We got to the hut by 2pm! Loads earlier than we thought but we had booked that hut so we stayed. There was one other guy staying in the hut that night. He was called Nabil and came from Paris. He was walking the whole track from the other side in 3 days. He was hitching round NZ for a month. We all headed to the bunks pretty early after cooking our dehydrated food on the stoves! We slept pretty well until 4am when we were woken up by the (we assume) rat scuttling around the hut including our room!!! The next morning was beautiful and as it took us such a quick time to walk the day before we decided to leave the big bag in the hut and James ran 16k up the hill to the James Macky Hut and a bit further whilst I walked in my own pace and met him on his way back down! We then walked back and stopped at the Heaphy Hut for the night. This one definitely did not have any rats as it was only a week old! It was more of a Hut-el (get it!?) hehe. We had been so lucky with the weather but on the last day it decided to rain . . . Heavily! It was kind of cool as the bush on the way back transformed again in the rain and the rivers were flowing a lot faster! We were back in the van by 11am (dripping wet!).
We are so glad that we did it but next time would definitely work out a way to do the whole thing (even though we walked the same distance as doing the whole thing) as we really wanted to see more!
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