waitakeres – Where is Phil now?

Visiting and old friend with an old friend.

Monday 04 April 2016 – Auckland, New Zealand.

Like most bloggers I also follow and read a few other WordPress blogs and sporadically randomly read a few others. I like to see what is out there, what other people are seeing and doing and maybe get ideas about writing and photography for my own use. I recently read a post by a youngish guy, I think he was English, who had just left Auckland. He was moaning about how boring, expensive and unfriendly he thought New Zealand and specifically Auckland was. In between his moaning he described what he did in Auckland. Pretty much nothing, he never left the city. No wonder he was bored.

I, on the other hand, always get out of the city, and today was going to be one of those out of the city days. I had yet to see my good friend Vicki on this trip, there just hadn’t been time so far to fit enough time in, but I had kept a day up my sleeve just in case. Vicki and I usually catch up over a walk or a run somewhere in the hills, as I did not have a huge amount of time we decided to keep it semi-local and go to one of my favourite places in the whole world – Karekare Beach.

Karekare is on Auckland’s west coast, it has no shops, few houses and a toilet block was only built there in the last few years. It feels remote, yet it is under an hour from the centre of the city, less if there is no traffic on the very winding road. It is a magical place and I have been here to run, walk, swim and photograph many many times.

There was not going to be much running today, I am woefully unfit and Vicki is very very fit and would leave me for dead on the trails, but we had lots of gossiping to do so a good walk was definitely in order. We started walking along the black sand beach – following where we could find them, the trail markers for the Hillary Trail.

I have mentioned the Hillary in previous posts, it was created in honour of Sir Edmund Hillary, and is 75kms of interlinked trail traversing the Waitakere Ranges from South to North (or Vice Versa). When it was first created it was a rugged and gnarly walk using old hiking trails. Over the last few years, it is slowly being ‘dumbed down’ and made easier and safer – though it was never dangerous. This is to cater more for the walking tourist who may not necessarily want to get their boots dirty, well that is how it seems to me. This section along the beach did not exist when I left the country, the trail was back in the hills then.

Back in the old kauri logging days there used to be a train line running along this section of the coast, ferrying the great logs to Whatipu where ships used to take them into Auckland, the train line is long gone, but the old tunnel at Tunnel Point still remains, as does a rusting hulk of a cylinder.

I stopped to take a few photos of the small lake that has long been here, stuck between the sand dunes and the cliff face, over a rainy winter this whole area can flood as the water comes down from the hills and finds nowhere else to go.

One of the things I really love about New Zealand is, apart from some people, there is nothing dangerous, too bitey or poisonous living here. Wading barefoot and legged through a swampy flooded lake might not feel good on the feet, but at least no animal is going to try and kill you. Being the end of summer, there was no flood, and no need to wade barefoot through anything at all. The only life we saw were a couple of black swans.

We turned inland past the lake and headed up the start of the Pararaha Valley. The first hundred yards or so cuts through reed beds and the track is a low boardwalk. Designed to allow 365 day access to the area, though I have walked up here before when the boardwalk has been submerged as well.

And then it was UP ! Buck Taylor was always one of my least favourite tracks on a long run or walk, it is steep ! But the view back down over the entrance to the valley is always worth it.

I was surprised by how much mud there was when we got to the ridge line at the top, there wasn’t huge amounts, but I was surprised to find any at all, given that it is the end of summer. It was good to see the tracks here are still proper hiking tracks with mud and roots uneven steps. Just how I like it.

We followed Zion Ridge Track, it is pretty flat and a real joy to run on, the bush up here is really nice too, with lots of manuka, kauri and puriri trees leaving layers of crunchy leaves on the trail.

We came across this big old puriri tree, slowly being taken over by the vine like rata. It is a massive tree, ancient and twisted. Lovely.

Very soon we were on the cliff top overlooking Karekare Beach where we started. Looking back down the beach towards Pararaha Valley.

Karekare Beach.

Now you can see why this is one of my favourite places ! Beach, surf, hills, mud, trees, wilderness. What is there not to love about Karekare.

It was a great couple of hours out and about, Vicki is good company, a not too old friend, but one of my best friends and it was great to catch up. Vicki is the editor of Kiwi Trail Runner magazine and is very enthusiastic about anything trail and trail running. She gave me a couple of issues of the mag to take home with me as I was not quite up to date !!

She also stores my trail shoes at her house, to save me carting them back and forth from England. Now that is a true friend !

Visiting one of my happy places, the Waitakere Ranges.

Sunday 27 March 2016 – Auckland, New Zealand.

Breaking with a long held, and slightly ridiculous, tradition I am going to post some photos taken over a few days, but in the same general location. Over the four year history of this blog I have pretty faithfully stuck to writing in chronological order. This vexes me mightily on occasion; especially when I have a photo I want to post ‘right now’ but there is a backlog of older things to write about so I can stick to my self-imposed fascination with chronological order.

This process change is a bit of annoyance as I had written a whole load of text over the past few days that followed the right order of things, so now I am going to hit delete and get rid of it. I am going to rebel against myself. Maybe this will be the start of something new – non-date based blog posts, change is good right ?

Mum, El and I had arranged to meet my daughter Mel and her partner DIckie at the Arataki Centre in the Waitakere Ranges. The ranges are pretty much entirely forest (or bush as we call it in NZ) and form the bulk of a regional park running along the western edge of the city of Auckland, separating the city from the Tasman Sea. The ranges are why I love Auckland, I lived on the fringes of the forest before I went travelling and moved to London. The Arataki Centre is the information hub for the ranges and quite a tourist spot, with some lovely views out over the national park.

El and I visited the centre when we last came to New Zealand, but this time we are going to do the 1.6km nature walk. I haven’t done the walk since the kids were small and we had a horrible experience dragging small children up a steep path amongst some trees – they hated it, and made sure we did to. I was hoping for a lot more now I am doing the walk with adults, even if one of those adults was originally one of those kids.

I have always had a love of trees, but this has become a bit of an obsession over recent times, especially the naked winter trees I see in England. New Zealand native trees are primarily evergreen, so seeing tree skeleton forests in wintery England is something I am really fascinated by. There would be no tree skeletons today. Early autumn in the Waitakere Ranges means a sea of green; there are very few colours in a northern NZ forest!

The nature walk is on the other side of the road from the information centre and there is an underpass to get there. This sign was at the entrance to the tunnel. A message we need to think about as cities expand into wilderness areas and we deforest our world in the name of growth.

The thing that stood out for me the most in the walk was the kauri trees. They are my favourite NZ tree and get to be very big over time, the largest remaining kauri in New Zealand is Tane Mahuta and I am planning on seeing it when El and I take a trip up north in a few days time. Tane Mahuta is somewhere between 1200 and 2000 years old, this tree is about 600. Stupidly I forgot to note its name, thinking the internet would supply it for me when I got home. It appears the internet cannot.

It is a magnificent tree, but looks to be suffering. The Waitakeres, and large areas of other native forests are inflicted with Kauri Dieback, a fungal disease which is killing both young and old kauri. Once a tree has been infected there is no cure, and a number of un-logged kauri groves have been devastated, it is terribly sad. The kauri is a tall, straight hardwood tree and covered the Auckland and Northland regions. They were hugely popular with European house and ship builders when they arrived in the 1800s, which resulted in almost all the forests being wiped out by loggers, with only a few ancient trees remaining across the northern part of the country.

It is a really nice walk, quite steep in parts, but it is short so overall it is not too strenuous, we took the small detour at the furthest end from the car park to the kauri knoll to see a few, much younger kauri trees. Not all hope for these trees is lost!

Dickie, Mel, me and El

There are a few other interesting things to see, perhaps if we had walked along the trail with tree names I would know what this rather interesting plant is called.

The New Zealand bush in the north island is sub-tropical, it is predominantly evergreen, and is pretty much entirely green in colour, there are very few plants that have bright flowers or berries.

The rata tree is an exception with lovely red flowers.

It was a very nice walk, and given we were outside for only a short time and it was not particularly sunny, it was all a bit hot and sweaty!

A couple of days later El and I had moved to stay at my sister’s house in Titirangi, she has only recently moved in and has renovated extensively, it is a lovely space to live, and is surrounded by immature kauri trees.

These three kauri are right outside the back door and the deck is built around them.

After the family had left after a very nice lunch El, my sister and I went for a walk around the block. (I will sneak a quick after lunch Mason photo just because I can. It is my blog after all)

A walk round the block where my sister lives is nothing like a walk round the block where El and I live in suburban London. There are some houses, she is very close to the city after all, but there is plenty of not-houses as well. Exhibition drive is a flat, gravel road that runs from the edge of Titirangi out towards the dams in the Waitakere Ranges. It is about 3.25km long, is closed to all motor vehicles and was a very regular running track for me. It is popular with walkers, and forms part of a good loop to walk from my sister’s house.

The road is used for service vehicles that monitor the pipes that run water from the dams to a nearby water treatment station.

The pipe runs fairly straight so there are lots of short tunnels on the way, when I was young you could walk/crawl through them, health and safety means they are all blocked off now.

The path is through a very scruffy, and regenerating part of the forest, it is a lovely walk, especially on a sunnyish day like today – and especially after a large lunch!

As the large trees were cut down a long time ago the lower level trees and scrub have taken off here and there are a large number of nikau palm and punga trees all along the walk.

I was looking for a bit of flare action through the nikau palm leaves.

I am fascinated by how the palm fronds appear to interlace with each other, forming patchworks of shadow and light.

I really like these roots, I think they are from an old macracarpa tree. I have photographed them before, may years ago, and I was pleased to see they were still intact, popping out of the bank below the tree, merging with the rock and the hard old clay.

We cut down a steep, and considering it is the end of summer, surprisingly muddy track down to a newer pipeline, and short cut back home. Not many people know about this section of pipeline, I found it years ago, when I was looking for short tracks to ride a mountain bike in this semi-urban area.

We were soon back at my sisters after another really enjoyable walk, in one of my favourite forests, and time for a glass of pinot gris before dinner.

A stroll in the bush

Monday 15 June 2015 – Auckland, New Zealand.

I have been in New Zealand for three days and have pretty much had no sleep since arriving. A combination of strange beds – three nights and three different beds, and trying to sleep when I should be getting up for work has not been helped by my failure to sleep easily. So I am tired.

I have had a good couple of days so far, I have completed all the shopping I need to do, cuddled my grandson and seen all of my Auckland based family and some of my friends. It feels like I haven’t stopped, but in reality it has all been a fairly static trip so far. I was going to go for mountain bike ride on Saturday morning but the weather conspired against us, today was going to be a trail run but Vicki, who I was to run with, had a monster race over the weekend so we decided to make it a walk instead. It suited me, as I said before I was tired.

The original idea was to run up Mt Pirongia in the Waikato, a spectacular run/walk that I have not done, but seeing as we were not going run it seemed a bit silly to get up before dawn to drive for a couple of hours just to walk. We decided to head to an old favourite, Piha – where there is good coffee as well as good trails.

Piha is not my favourite beach on Auckland’s west coast, it is a close second to Karekare. However, Piha was one of my favourite places to trail run. Wonderful trails with awesome views and the bonus of a great cafe where turning up looking for coffee covered in mud and smelling a bit was not overly frowned upon.

Disappointing as it was, with hindsight, walking rather than running was a good idea. I have hardly run in weeks and Vicki has been knocking out fast paced ultra-marathons like they are going out of business. There was no way I would have survived a run like Pirongia. Walking meant we could natter for longer – including up the many climbs, and nattering is something we do best on our runs.

We had decided on a nice loop from the end of Glen Esk Rd, that captures all the good things about this section of the Waitakeres – a nice stream, kauri trees, some views and some glorious twisty, rooty single track.

Kauri die-back is a serious issue for the Waitakere Ranges – as well as other areas of native forest in the north of New Zealand. Kauri Dieback is caused by a fungus like disease that is killing kauri trees, it was only discovered in 2008. It is a spore that that gets into the roots of the tree, spreading up and eventually killing the tree, trees of all ages are affected and it is thought to be spread by animals, birds and humans. There are numerous spray stations around the park.

Like a lot of the waterways in the park in the early 19^th century the Piha stream was dammed and then used to float kauri logs down to logging mills on the coast. The remains of some of the dams can still be found in various locations.

We headed up Centennial track from Piha Valley track.

There are still a couple of fun sections on the trail, yet to be made day tripper friendly…

With a rewarding view down the valley.

Vicki had been telling me about the work the council had been doing on ‘maintaining’ some of the tracks, especially those on the Hillary Trail, the 85km long section of trails made famous by Sir Ed Hillary. This basically means widening the trail, removing anything remotely challenging and then covering the track in gravel, – thus removing half the fun of bush walking, but making the trails easier for those who don’t want to get dirty I guess. On the Forbes Trail it was pleasing to see they had not been every where !

Our final trail was the Maungaroa Ridge track, one of my favourite trails.

It is a great running trail, especially going anti-clockwise as there is more downhill, there are also some really nice kauri sections and it was lovely to see they are all still standing.

There is a look out just off to the side of the trail before it drops back down to Glen Esk Rd and back where we started.

And back over where we had just walked.

The Piha Cafe was closed due to a power outage, which was a real bummer, so Vicki and I headed back into Titirangi for a late lunch in one of the many cafes there.

It was a really nice day out, great to catch up with Vicki and share each others news and solve all of life’s issues.