What a night! Hands down the worst sleep of the trip, and it was all due to the noise and my own paranoia. As you settle down to sleep you become acutely more aware of all the sounds going on around you. Also, as the sun goes down the amount of noise animals make tends to ramp up a notch. Being near the end of the track I was close to farms and from the valley below came the sounds of dogs barking and cattle bellowing...not lowing...BELLOWING. One of them sounded like he was trying to out-bray a donkey. What also had me concerned was how close they sounded. It had me convinced that at any moment obviously discontented beasts would come lumbering round the corner...and what they would make of my tent and me in it I had no idea. The cattle bellowed off and on for what felt like (and surely must have been) hours. Then as soon as there was a bit of quiet first one possum cackled in a tree close by on my right, shortly followed by a second close by on my left. One farther away on the opposite side of the track made a half-hearted effort to cough (or something) but it was the original one on my right that launched into a repetitive hacking cackle...which abruptly came to a halt when I finally lost it and yelled "Shuuut Uuup!!". Silence prevailed, at least for a little while, and for the rest of the night the possums mercifully keep the noise to a leaf-rustling minimum. Possum Right clambered down his tree at one point and cautiously approached the tent. Feeling a bit vengeful for being kept awake for so long I lay in silence and let him get right up close before saying "boo!" and couldn't help chuckling as I heard him scamper away at top speed.
The next noisy shift was the moreporks, which I don't really mind as I love listening to them and can usually fall asleep to their calling...usually. Turns out when you get six of them going at different spots in the same valley the combined stereo sound of "more-pork!" being sung in an overlapping round is quite distracting to a semi-conscious brain.
The best noise was amongst a morepork or two once the main choir had retired, leaving only a duet...the repeated rising trill of a kiwi...and then another. The first one didn't sound too far away so I lay quietly listening, hoping to hear it again, maybe closer, maybe with a rustle of leaf litter as it foraged nearby. That excitement and anticipation kept me up even longer, but eventually the forest critters and I all must have got some sleep because eventually it was morning...and I was SO tired. Consequently I had a lie in and did not get underway until 10 am.
It turns out I camped in the last possible spot as right around the second bend I popped out of the trees and into a grassy paddock the fell in rolling hills away into the valley below. On a nearby hill was a cluster of sizable bulls who I can only assume were the bellowers from the night before, and I felt that my anxiety over the possibility of an unpleasant nighttime encounter with a herd of marauding cattle had not been entirely unwarranted. They stared and bellowed a bit as I made my way down the hill opposite them, and once I reached the valley between they made off, mercifully over the hill and out of view (I had been traversing the slope with half a mind to break out my hiker poles in case they were required to fend of unhappy bovines).
Down a farm track and out onto a gravel road, a couple of kilometers brought be to SH1. It's then a 5 km hike along the highway to Mangamuka Bridge. The shoulder is broad so its'not as scary as it could be, but I always made sure to get well out of the way of any of the many trucks that came by during that slog. There's a wonderful little dairy at Mangamuka Bridge that makes (as it turns out) great burgers and yummy kumara trips. Lyssa (Eliza?) keeps a visitors log of hikers who come through; there seems to have been about twenty so far this year. Reading the log it turns out Scott and Joanne only came through yesterday, along with Speed Demon (who it appears is also called Scott, and apparently almost concust himself on a log whilst doing the Raetea track at his customary high speed). Curiously there's no sign of Nathalie or Niko in the book, but maybe they just didn't sign it.
I made a long stop at the dairy of about and hour and a half. I scarfed down my burger and chips, along with a juice and a can of lift. Normally I wouldn't have any trouble with this volume of food, but things have changed already on this hike, and I couldn't finish my chips (and probably shouldn't have had them at all, as I would later discover).
I finally got back underway at 2 pm, with 12 km between me and my planned camping spot at Apple Dam or Apple Tree Campsite (depending on what sign you read). Happily only the first 2 km of this are along SH1 before you turn up gravel Omahuta Rd and carry on to the small settlement of (surprisingly enough) Omahuta, before diverting up further gravel roads into the Puketi Forest. I passed a guy in an excavator who was clearing culverts on the way. He stopped to talk to me, happily hailing me as "the first one through for the day". He confirmed what the book had said, that Scott (x2) and Joanne had come through yesterday (although his descriptions were a jogging guy, a big guy and a lady). I don't remember Scott being big, but then maybe he looks it in his special pack that has pockets on the front harness to store stuff and help balance the weight (that Scott fondly referred to as his "man boobs").
Just before heading into the Puketi Forest I came across a roading crew working on the forestry road. Most of them weren't at all interested in me passing by, but one chatty guy sized up me and my pack and wanted to know if I was "into this sort of thing?". Here I am so I suppose I must be, I thought, but audibly I laughed and said I needed the exercise. He laughed in turn, saying he thought there were easier ways of getting it. He didn't know where the road I was following went so I vaguely answered that it goes through the forest, up a river, and pops out at Kerikeri. He nodded ok and wished me luck, watching in amusement as I trudged past. Incidentally I've managed to take the odd unflattering selfie of me saddled with my full kit and I'd like to state that on most days, up until the mid-late afternoon, I don't actually feel as knackered as I look!
But this afternoon I did. I had the long slow slog going that gets me up hills...kind of like a human cable car: one super slow speed only and you can hear the clicks and cracks of the gears grinding as it goes. Unfortunately I'd had indigestion all afternoon, partly I suspect from eating too much at the dairy and partly from having my waist belt part of the pack harness done up too high and tight (in an effort to give my shoulders a bit of a rest). The fact that I'd been downing lots of water in the heat probably also didn't help. The result of all this was about halfway up the hill I began to get the telltale tummy trembles that usually alert me to the fact that my stomach is not particularly happy and may opt to empty itself in the near future. I pulled over and flopped down under a fern tree on the drop-off side of the road, fortunately having the presence of mind to place gear in a manner that meant it would not roll and tumble down the slope. I was sitting there contemplating life and digestion when a an elderly couple drove past, presumably on their way up to visit the Kauri Reserve at the road end. They looked at me a little quizzically as they went by. They'd have looked a little more quizzical if they'd driven passed five minutes later when I was head down bum up under the tree fern, losing the undigested half of my lunch. Still, afterward I felt much better and donned pack once again determined to make it to Apple Dam before nightfall.
The campsite is 500 m off the trail...a suspiciously long "500 m" I think. But eventually I got there, with plenty of light to spare, but not one once of energy. No one else was there...not really surprising as what had been described as a "pretty campsite" with a "water tank and a long drop loo". I'll concede to "pretty" as it's a nice little spot nestled in between the hills next to a broad pond (dam?) filled with reeds...but the water tank is the old concrete sort with a hole in the roof and God knows what festering in the bottom but a surprisingly shiny (new?) stainless steel tap, and the long drop loo has long been off DOC's radar in terms of scheduled maintenance. First off there's no path to it (at least, not anymore), the front wall is collapsing, the door has fallen off its hinges, and there's no seat. It's basically in the same condition as the abandoned logger camp I passed on the Herekino Track, with the more recent addition of a token roll of yellowed toilet paper I suspect some kind hiker has left but which no one seems to have used. Still, it was a loo, and the chipboard around the bowl was clean. Half expecting a bat to come flying out as I went to sit down I none the less decided that just at the moment, with my tummy still funny, I preferred this option to the cat mound approach that was my only alternative. Happily I emerged from the disheveled wooden shack feeling much better and minus any startled bats or other critters.
Returning to the small patch of clipped grass (so I guess someone does some maintenance here...) I pitched my tent and flopped down inside. It had been a hard day. I am now nursing some nice blisters from by adventures on the steep sections of the Raetea Track, and three days compounded sweat and lost lunch all combined to make me feeling altogether pretty average. In a snap I'd had enough. I had plenty of water (and besides there was a water tank and failing that a pond nearby), and I still have plenty of fuel, and I'm not going to be having any dinner tonight, so I fished out the pot and cooker and heated some water. Tipping the water into the pot container sack (which is marketed as doubling as a small sink) I added my little bar of soap and soaked my mud-stained hands. In a few minutes I'd managed to cleanse even my black finger nails back to their normal pinky-white. The joy was palpable...and addictive.
The problem with cleaning is as soon as you clean one thing you spot dirt on another. There I was with beautiful clean hands and the rest of me was filthy, and feeling like it. What the hell, I had the time, I had the means, and I had the place all to myself. Half and hour later I'd had a full sponge bath in lovely warm soapy water (I tried to be sparing with the soap and dutifully discarded it away from the natural waterways). OMG I was clean! What a relief! Feeling much better I doctored my blisters, took an ibuprofen-panadol combo to combat residual aches (am determined not to make a habit of this, but today I needed the boost of not-sore body) and settled down to sleep. Ahhhh....
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