North West Circuit
Day 2: Bungaree Beach - Christmas Village 11km 6hrs
- Hut nights: 7
- Solo hut nights: 6
- People in huts: 4
- Overall people: 6
- Kiwi: 1
I slept in, not that I had a plane to catch. I blame the gentle lapping of the ocean. Up and cup of tea, cereal, pack the pack, and hit the track. The sun was not making an appearance yet. In the place of the medicinal benefits of sunlight would be the soothing qualities of a benign forest. And what a forest. The east coast of this track was marked by it's high quality bush. You could easily imagine you had just set foot on the island off an ancestor's waka, or one of Captain Cook's ships. Untouched, virginal, original and magnificent. I had not had the same sense of pure bush-ness anywhere else on our two main islands. The size, variety and beauty of it all unparalleled. This forest was the goods. I struggled with my lens to capture its essence. But I'd known long ago that the multi-dimensional pleasure one feels in a forest is one of the hardest things to capture two dimensionally.
I'd been going over an hour when I came onto Murray Beach, a long sandy stretch that I would traverse before re-joining the track. Coming over the top of a dune I was at once attacked by a battalion of sandflies Out with the insect repellant. I imagined myself landing on a beach on D-Day, or Gallipolli, facing the unrelenting enemy. Apart from coming to a stop on beaches and attracting their attention the island was blissfully free of these blighters, no doubt it's a different story in summer. Once I was walking down the beach the sandflies abated and I surveyed the view. Looking out to sea I Southland and the snow topped Fiordland mountains sat low on the horizon. No photo-ops under the grey sky though so I carried on and re-joined the bush at the other end of the beach. Just in from the beach was a rough built camp, perhaps used by locals for fishing or hunting expeditions. It had a castaway feel about it and I came across a home built trap that one wondered what they caught with it.
The track carried on hour after hour, for the most part the going was not to strenuous, and the bush was still magnificent. There were patches of mud that I skirted around using my walking pole to balance on but mostly it was not that bad. I stopped for a self portrait at one point, otherwise I trudged on. As the time got on and the light began to indicate it was late afternoon I began to wonder why after a good 6 hours of steady progress I hadn't reached the hut, maybe I'd tragically missed a turn off. Restlessness was finally rewarded with a sign to Christmas Village hut, with neither Christmas or a village in sight. I came out onto a rocky beach and the hut was pleasantly positioned just above the beach with coastal views. It was near dusk by then and I followed the rituals of the night before. It was Sunday night and the working week would begin tomorrow with the last bit of the East coast before heading over the top of the island on what was going to be a very long day on Tuesday.
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