Day 12: Te Ānau to Kiwiburn hut

The day started with Breakfast in Te Ānau. We saw a bus load of Milford sound walkers show up for breakfast just after ours came out, so we were lucky to have beat them to the punch. After breakfast we needed to run a few errands. We got 3 m of thicker cordage to redo all the tent stake lines, Emma swapped her icebreakers socks for some new ones as hers he e developing a hole, and purchased a duplicate pair. They seem to cause less blisters than her injinji's. We also picked up some electrolights and some earplugs in preparation for hitting the more mainstream Greenstone Caples part of the trail in the next section.

Then we needed to hitch hike 30 odd km back along SH94 to get to where we had been picked up yesterday. Unfortunately the police drove right by, but it wouldn't be long before a young builder would come to collect us in his beat up runabout with duct tape holding the passenger window up. He'd just finished building a deck for a guy and was headed back to Invercargill. He dropped us a few km up the road, to call in at a mates place and we tried for a second hitch unsuccessfully for about 15 minutes before our first character came and collected us again and took us the rest of the way. He's planning on doing 11 days out on the Dragon's Teeth in January up in Kahurangi... Emma's Uncle Warrick's stomping ground.

We dropped all of our coins in his dash board (not wanting to carry them) and he was off. We had 2.5 km on SH94 to walk that we hadn't done the day prior to meet Rose.

It was a quick walk, under 30 minutes, and we found Rose in the middle of a drawing with Cheese and Crackers prepared for us. She had been dropped off by the bus at 09:00 and it was now around 11:00... She had planned to stay in Te Ānau with us the night before but she had missed her flight. Feeling sorry for her, and the size and weight of her pack, I snaffled her tent from her and strapped it to the outside of my bag.

Then we set off along a gravel road, which we would remain on for the majority of the day. Some 25 km or so anyway. A fitting introduction to the Te Araroa for Rose in any case. Emma and I didn't much mind as we were making very fast distance compared to our slow and arduous slog through the Tākitimu section the last couple of days. I had neglected to bring much water, thinking I would readily be able to source some from the river that the road runs along side. This river however happened to be in serious farming country, it was still clear, though infested with dydimo... I was forced to collect from it, not thinking too much of it at the time given that we carry a water filter which I studiously utilised. However, this would come back to bite me later that night and over then next couple of days when nausea set in and my guts did not settle. Let's just say that I'm glad to have Immodium in the first aid kit. I would be forced to weather a sick day the next day while the girls carried on, leaving me to pull double duty to catchup. My appetite wouldn't return for a few days. Hard to know what the lesson is here but there is one somewhere, use tabs and a filter? Don't trust the filter? Pack more water? Whatever it was, I probably didn't get the full whammy, so the filter likely did something at least.

We departed the road, and had a short stint adjacent to the rivers edge before needing to cross it. It was probably mid-thigh and moving relatively swiftly, so we unbuckled our pack buckles, linked arms and formed a chain to cross with me upstream, Rose in the middle, and Emma downstream.

On the other side we were greeted by our best manicured section of bush trail that we'd yet seen. It was only 1 to 2 km up to the hut from here, but it was some of the most pleasant track we'd yet had. The one piece of bog had a perfectly placed log over the top of it, and I was smiling ear to ear.

Shortly after we found kiwi burn hut nestled around a bend hidden in the bush. A beautiful hut, that I would definitely recommend visiting.

Rose stopped, and shortly after had her legs lock up on her. Emma and I were fine, we must have finally found our trail legs. We'd stopped halfway through the day to take some hotspots on Rose's feet and this seemed to do the job in preventing there from becoming blisters.

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