50 Simple Pleasures, Morbid Curiosities & Mood Crushers of the TA tramper, by Lisa Allan (Nugget)
Even now my heart soars to the heights of the Tararua Ranges, where part of me will always be walking, shrouded in mist, my cold face awake to the vastness of Earth and Sky. Every time I mention or my mind wanders to The Trail, I feel my cells begin to vibrate excitedly. For during the three months that I was walking I reconnected to something so primal and natural that the everyday life to which I have returned can only ever seem artificial and somewhat disconnected from nature in comparison. Yes, this is another article about the Te Araroa Trail. From February to May, my husband, Dan, and I, Lisa, walked the length of Te Ika a Maui, the North Island. It was a kaleidoscope of aliveness that I hope to share in some small part by detailing what gave us pleasure… or not, as we walked and walked and walked.
I have promised a list of 50 Simple Pleasures, Morbid Curiosities and Mood Crushers of the TA walker and I shall deliver. Pleasure is a curious thing. Being pleased by something is a whole body experience. Your bones seem to stack taller. Your muscles hug in. Your breath is condensed in an inward rush. Your eyes light up. Your lips tingle. Your heart sings out — yussss! And you look around wildly for someone to share your object of delight with. Well, this is my experience and it comes in degrees on a pleasure spectrum depending on how unexpected the find or happening is. Then there are things that you are drawn to but you know your intrigue is morbid and you should move away… but you just can’t. And finally, there are the mood crushers. Things that just knock the wind out of your sails and might even produce a lump in your throat or a tear or two. But somehow, these too are collated along with the good, because they offer richness of experience.
Anywho, lace up and read on!
Simple pleasures
#1 Finding a rubbish bin. I care about the environment, I do, but when your life is squished into a small bag for three months you do not want to carry anything more than you need to carry. Rubbish bin for the win. (Thank you to the household on Kaimango Rd between Pirongia and Waitomo that have a bin at their gate specifically for TA walkers — you made us unproportionally happy that day.)
#2 Peeing roadside without being sprung. Gross, I know. But your inhibitions will quickly be superseded by your need and the thrill of a successful covert pee will be all yours!
#3 Finding drinking water. There is a surprising lack of fountains along the trail. Finding one, or a tap, or a river — especially when it’s the height of summer and you’re saturated with sweat — glorious. (Little tip: schools have fountains).
#4 Seeing a kingfisher. So many roads. So many powerlines. So many kingfishers! If you spot a kingfisher, your happiness levels go up 10%, that’s science.
#5 Your wet socks drying out overnight. Wet sock, bad. Dry sock, divine.
#6 Completing a river crossing. There are many tidal river crossings that have the water coming up even as far as your collarbone. Most of the time you’re toting your bag on your head. Getting to the other side, without wetting your stuff, boom. Simple pleasure.
#7 Roadside fruit. Healthy, thrifty and nifty.
#8 Being offered a beer on the four day long stretch that is 90 Mile Beach. Some don’t make it (the walk, not the beer). Some are so maimed by it (the walk, not the beer) that they hobble off the beach in Ahipara and need a week to recover. We were sustained by the kindness of strangers. Beer. Beach. Sun. Quenched. Easy.
#9 Being gifted fresh fish cakes on the four day long stretch that is 90 Mile Beach. Fish cakes. Beach. Sun. Sated. Easy.
#10 A hot shower that doesn’t ‘time out.’ When you’ve walked for 10 hours, you stink worse than an armpit full of onions, you’re muddy, you’re cold, you just need a little hot lovin. Thank you to the Shower Controllers that don’t shut you off after four minutes. You are angels. You are saints. You are saving the world from smelly trampers.
#11 Arriving at your accommodation before dark. Sweet relief. Now, quickly set up your tent and make dinner because it’s nearly bedtime!
#12 Overtaking walkers that don’t have packs on. This started happening for us about five weeks in. I think we got faster! Either that or people walk slower the further south you go? It could actually be that. It’s probably that. Ok, it’s definitely that but it still felt great.
#13 Finding the perfect combination of clothes to make your pillow out of. Icebreaker merino (that doesn’t get washed for three months), pink t-shirt, tomorrow’s tights. And they’re all warm for you to put on the next morning. #winningatlife
#14 Not getting a blister.
#15 Finding roadside dosh. We found a total of $7.50. Washing machine, here we come. And corn. Have you ever bought, cooked and eaten corn by a highway? With money you FOUND?! So good.
#16 Talking about washing machines… getting fresh laundry, ah, so good!
#17 Reading Anita Shrieve’s The Stars are Fire when you’re locked out of Auckland and have to wait it out in Waipu Cove (torture, not).
#18 Rainbows. I mean… it’s a rainbow. That is, unless it’s an orb (rainorb?). Double pleasure points for orbs. Mt Crawford, I’m looking at you.
#19 Finding a toilet WITH toilet paper in it. Oh, the Gods are smiling on us this day! Note to self, write an article about the art of toileting on the TA.
#20 Finding Backcountry Cuisine. For a really popular tramping food on a really popular trail, it’s surprising difficult to find these dehydrated saving graces. Especially just the rice and mixed vegies which is what we would have totally lived on. Finding these? Best. Day. Ever.
#21 Crossing paths with a NOBO. Our route was SOBO (South Bound). A NOBO is North Bound. You see them coming a mile off. Or bump into them around a rocky corner as the tide surges in around you. They are hairy. They are smelly (no offence, it’s just how it goes). Their packs are falling apart. They have things jingling and jangling from their packs. They are in a world of their own. You speak the code. TA NOBO? They nod. They reply. TA SOBO? You nod. Then all verbal hell breaks loose as you try to bestow as much knowledge upon each other as you can before you are swept out to sea or the weather packs in. And then they are gone. Who knows when you’ll meet another. They are rare. Treasure them.
#22 The Marsden Point Info Centre. This is not a real thing. This is a game that anyone can play. How to play? Simple. You ask any yes/no question to your tramping partner (addressing them as Dear Marsden Point Info Centre) and they reply with ‘no’ and must justify why it’s a ‘no.’ Hours of fun.
#23 Adjusting your pack, relieving pain. This rarely works but that one time in a million that it does… you just hit the jackpot!
#24 Coining new vocab. Gherkin. A section of that day’s walk that seems to be thrown in to throw you off. Farkar. Cars in the distance on 90 Mile Beach, zooming towards you. Lisa and Dan’s TA Dictionary coming soon…
#25 Getting a free room upgrade. Pickled Parrot. You rock. We will come back and make you another red velvet cake from a packet.
#26 Mushrooms! Edible, non-edible, colourful, plain, bunched, solo, delightful hats on stalks that can’t help but brighten your day and add hours to your trail. We walked Feb — May, so it was a prime fungi finding free-for-all. Apologies to my long-suffering husband who does not share my fungal fascination. F. (that’s the letter, not the word associated with the letter!)
Morbid Curiosities (reader beware)
#27 Road kill. Have you walked hundreds of kms along roads lately? I have. And I can tell you that we saw things so horrific that shivers still run up my spine, over my head and grab my face like a skeletal hand rising from a rotting grave when I think of them. Clench! This, times 1000. Possums, rabbits, frogs, mice. Flattened, partially flattened with select features still in 3D, eyes bulging, guts splayed, heads missing, bloated, twisted, teeth protruding in an almost human expression… These be the things to inspire horror. Directors of the genre, look to the roads, the stuff of nightmares be waiting. We’d walk past saying ‘look away, look away’ whilst our eyes disobeyed devouring every inch of morbidity. Sometimes we’d stop, wasting precious daylight hours, unable to move until our minds made some sick sense of what we were seeing. I have photos. I wish I had more. Is this wrong? I’m so confused.
#28 Road-side rubbish. Sadly, there is a lot of this. And when you’re walking hundreds of kms along roads day after day you can’t help but start to create a rudimentary system of statistics. We saw dolls, books, nappies, clothes, a credit card, fast food packaging, shoes, gardening gloves (so many gardening gloves) but unequivocally there was one type of rubbish that we saw again and again and again. It was present above and beyond any other type of trash. This terrible honour goes to — drum roll of doom … V. Hm… ever notice that a V looks like a two-fingered salute? Instead of issuing this, we loudly exclaimed ‘V!’ every time we saw a can/bottle. Two Vs together, that’s a W. Three? Triple rainbow, what does it mean?! Who is throwing these vessels out the window? Is it one person driving the same stretch of road every day or many people doing a bad thing ‘just this once?’ Such are the thoughts that plague a TA Walker as they pace relentlessly down the places where cars also go. Coke, if you think you’ve gotten off here, you haven’t. You came in second.
#29 Post-break ache. This rhymes which is ironic, there is nothing fluid about your body trying to get up and get going again after a break. We were creaking, groaning, cramping and hobbling (painfully yet joyfully, if you can imagine that? The sound track was something like ‘ooh ooh ooh’) for a few moments after breaking for the first month. Then, somewhere along the trail, that just stopped happening. We were suddenly walking machines, oiled and un-coiled! Non-ironic rhyme.
#30 Bladder infection spill. Not a urinary spill. That would be morbid indeed. Through the Dome Forest I realised I had a bladder infection, very uncomfortable. It stuck around for a few days. We had barely seen anyone on the tracks since we started. Anyone at all. We had started to behave as if we were totally alone. Singing, doing silly voices- who am I kidding, this is what we do for a living, we would have been walking like this regardless. Anywho, we were on a track between Puhoi and Orewa and I said to Dan, ‘Do you think my bladder infection will go away by itself?’ and he replied ‘I dunno, mine did.’ When a man suddenly appeared with a strange half-smirk on his face. He totally heard everything. Embarrassing. Wonderful. Love these life moments.
#31 Whanganui River dunk. Avoiding getting wet is a big part of tramping for months on end. Getting wet is such a nuisance. Every fibre of my being had the avoidance of unnecessary water as its number one objective. So, boarding a canoe for three days was a challenge. Not only were we now perilously close to being saturated right through, but it was heaving down with rain. As above, so below. And on the third day, in the rapid they call the 50–50 (named for reasons you can probably ascertain), over we went. And it was deep. And it was swift. And our canoe got trapped in a ravenous eddy. But how curiously wonderful to be fully immersed in this incredible body of water. It was cold and wet, but it was also an honour.
#32 That moment you realise you’re feral. You think there’s no one around. You really have to pee. You pee. There’s someone around. You lock eyes. Your eyes get really big but you can’t stop peeing. They look away. And now you know. And so do they. The TA has turned you feral. Other contributing factors: you eat all meals with a deft and quickly repeated scooping motion without looking up, you eat anything that you have dropped on ANY surface, you go to extraordinary lengths for roadside fruit, you hope huts have spare food in them, you’ll eat anything, even if it’s out of date, you wear the same clothes day in and day out and think you smell fine, when you do washing, you dry it on your pack as you walk, even undies with huge holes in the rear. And you like being like this. Feral is your new normal.
#33 Not packing enough cheese. This is a border-line mood crusher. But making one thin slice of pre-cut cheddar per day stretch to three days worth of wraps (with no other ingredients) and two days of crackers… there’s definitely a morbid curiosity and strange coping-satisfaction that arises, so here it sits. Tip: always pack enough cheese.
#34 A gorse/blackberry covered style. I mean, is this a joke? How do we get through here? Fun fact, the worst-style-in-existence award goes to the Mangamuka Track. Wow. Just, wow.
And this brings us to the final of today’s categories…
Mood Crushers of the TA Walker
#35 The track not being obvious. As such, having to keep getting your tramping partner’s phone out of their pack to check the app and then put it away in their annoying top pocket or keeping it in your pocket (who am I kidding, I never had pockets, Dan had to pocket it) or wasting precious daylight hours scanning the distant horizons for that little orange triangle of ‘this way!’
#36 Having to backtrack. It didn’t happen to us very often. But when it did, meh. It breaks your flow, it throws your arrival time out, it erodes your confidence and it makes the trail seem that little bit harder when you do get back on it.
#37 Walking past bulls. They are scary. They are big. I know they hate me. And it’s not just the bulls. Walking with a herd of cows marching right up behind me gives me the willies. It is one of those times in life when I will put myself first, fending off all others so I might scurry over the style, leaving Dan to face these killer-beasts, as quickly as I can.
#38 Water going anywhere it shouldn’t. I’m not an angry person. Although I did kick a glass door in when I was a teenager. So, perhaps I’m channelling my inner teen Lisa when I go to pick up my pack and it’s soaked. Water bladder malfunction. Worst. Thing. Ever. RAGE. My rage these days involves me literally hanging my head and pursing my lips real tight. I think I’d laugh to see me, but it’s not funny, it’s not!
#39 Four minutes of hot water. It’s not enough. I don’t want to be cold. I want to be warm. All people responsible for four minute showers, please refer to Simple Pleasure #10 and adapt your mindset accordingly. Please and thank you.
#40 Being threatened. We brushed our teeth in the kitchen. We were threatened with a ‘smack in the head.’ Terrifying.
#41 Your sleeping mat going flat. Bones. Ground. Enough said.
#42 TA app not reflecting the TA track. Wild goose chase anyone?
#43 Getting an electric shock, twice. Compounded by underestimating the difficulty of a section, the track being elusive, the light fading…
#44 Urban sprawl. Breaks my heart to see new developments plonked down without care or consideration for what exists around them. Cookie cutter housing, no yards, no eco-adaptations visible, existing communities crowded and priced out of their homes. Property developers have a lot to answer for, more coming on this.
#45 Rude drivers. To be fair, most people were amazingly considerate. Some people were idiots.
#46 Kauri dieback. This is affecting a lot of our Northland forests. It’s very sad.
#47 Dead sharks and stingrays. Is it allowed to fish up a whole bunch of sharks and stingrays and just leave them to rot on the beach? Mood crushed. Very sad.
#48 People fishing with torpedo. It doesn’t seem right that you can stand on the beach with your 4wd and shoot a torpedo out into the ocean, winding it back in with more fish than you need. The premise of it just doesn’t sit well with me.
#49 Carrying a found credit card to an anticlimax. When you find a roadside credit card and carry it for 100kms or more to a Kiwibank only to be told that there is no way of returning it to its owner and no you can’t get a message to them to tell them where it was found. Mission failed. Happy hopeful heart, dashed to cinders.
#50 Gherkin. When you’ve had a big day and you’re almost at the end and the track throws a gherkin at you (see #24). Mood crushed. Until you name it for what it is, then it moves into the pleasure zone!
Finishing with the mood crushers leaves you with a realistic sense of the TA. But I can’t leave you there. Come back with me to the Tararua Ranges. We’re walking through a thick mist, droplets forming on the tiny hairs on our faces, the cool air enlivening our senses, huge drops either side of you. This is living. This is connection. The euphoria of this moment is only possible because of the mood crushers. As we said during our walk ‘what goes down, must go up.’
Thank you to all the TA Trustees and to everyone who has ever contributed to the creation of this walk. You have made my life richer and I will carry these simple pleasures, morbid curiosities and mood crushers like the taonga they are. Forever.
