tramping new zealand

After attending a wedding on Waiheke Island and having one of the most expensive weekends of my life, it was time for a change of scene.

Something familiar, yet different.

Time to check out the Kaimais while I was so far north, as it was more or less on my way home to the South Island. I spent an afternoon plotting an itinerary to take into account a few days of poor weather early on.

The plan was to do an overnighter around a short loop that visited two huts along the way.

I stayed in Hamilton and failed to get away early. Then I stopped in Matamata for a coffee, so it wasn’t until almost 12 pm that I’d loaded the food and gear into my pack and set off.

You climb about 180 m through a farm at first, on a farm track, but then I was shunted into a paddock with some cattle. Came off the poorly marked route, then climbed through another paddock with the cattle, crossing a few electric fences. Some drizzle and showers, but that didn’t mean much when I was in the forest after 45 minutes.

More steep climbing to get from the car park at 130 m to the bush line at 300 m, then to the top of the plateau about 520 m. It was undulating from there once I turned off onto the route to Mangamuka Hut.

The track had been cut at some stage a few years before, so it was super easy to follow and mostly quite gentle. The drizzle was coming down, but the forest aggregated it into solid drops. It was a surprise to find the hut just 10 m away through the forest.

Welcome, for sure, since by then the forest was swishing around in the breeze prodigiously, so the shelter was appreciated. Despite being before 3 30 pm, I decided to stay. My clothes were soaked, and a windchill factor had made me cold, so I quickly put on dry clothes.

A Tuesday with poor weather on the obscure route rather than the main north-south track, with a large, flashier hut, should keep others away from the three bunker. And so it proved.

I slid into my sleeping bag to fully warm up early on, about 7 30 pm, to eat my dinner, and once that was done, it didn’t take long to doze off.