CAPE BRETT TRACK

It seemed a mission driving all the way to the Bay of Islands Friday night to hike 40 km over the weekend and then drive home afterwards to happily go to work again on Monday? Crazy idea? Well, we did it.

It didn't start very well. Picking up Phil from his late shift after work our battery died. I always appreciate Phil's initiative in situations like that. He got the work van out of the garage to jump start our car. Sounds pretty simple but keep in mind the cars are GPS tracked which somehow needed an explanation as Phil isn't even suppose to drive them. Also, the alarm of the building was set to 10pm, not giving us an awful lot of time to finish the procedure successfully.

It took us over 4 hours to drive up to the start of the track in Rawhiti as we stopped hundreds of times on the last stretch looking at all the cute possums.

We slept in the car that night and started our track at 8am the next morning. The first 2 hours were pretty hard but we thought it can't go uphill forever. That proofed us wrong as the whole track is a constant up and down. We finally reached a sign pointing out the last 2 hours of the track. After already hiking 5 hours it seemed the end was close.

Unfortunately the end was also the hardest bit we found. Maybe because we were getting tired, maybe because it seems so much further away we struggled on the very last stretch.

When we suddenly saw the light house in front of us we felt absolutely overwhelmed. A steep downhill to the former light house keepers cottage and we were able to take those shoes of our burning feet.

We were spoil by a bottle of wine someone left untouched. We drank it sitting on the cliffs and it felt so far away from any civilisation.