This is a guide for people wanting to through-hike the Te Araroa Trail in New Zealand going from south to north.

What is the Te Araroa Trail? It’s a walking track about 3,000 km long from Bluff at the southern tip of the South Island to Cape Reinga at the top of the North Island that was officially opened in 2011. It ranges over mountains and farmland, through forest, along beaches, on back roads, and in a few parts, through towns and suburbs. It takes about 4 to 5 months to walk.

Why Northbound (NoBo)?

Most people walking the Te Araroa (TA) go from north-to-south. So why go the other way? And why is it mainly Kiwis who are doing it? Well, it’s because they know the weather is warmer the further north you go. Most TA hikers going SoBo (southbound) will start around November and end up in Southland in March or April, walking into autumn in the coldest part of the country. Better to walk away from the increasingly cooler, wetter weather. Doing this also gives you a larger window of start dates if you are walking the entire country, because you end up in the so-called ‘winterless north’ (17 degrees average in April vs 10.5 in Invercargill in the same month). See FAQs page for more on when to go.

Are there any good reasons for going north to south, besides the fact that the main guides are written that way? Well, maybe they have been written in that direction because the Whanganui River section in the North Island consists of canoeing downstream. If you want to do the North Island NoBo, then working round that is tricky but do-able. Or you could always walk the South Island NoBo and the North Island SoBo.

Camp Stream Hut, Two Thumb Range, South Island

Something else to consider is people. Since the default direction is south-bound then if you are doing the same you will find yourself with a cohort of others also going south. The composition of the group of people going at your speed and on your route will change over time, but the end result is that doing the TA SoBo can be quite a social experience and making friends on the trail is what some people like about it. When you go NoBo there will be a much smaller group of you, which might create a closer sort of connection. But the majority of people you encounter will be hikers coming towards you. You will meet most of them around the middle of the day, or in the evening in huts and campsites. These are good opportunities to swap info about what is coming up on the trail but you won’t see these people again. And over the course of your hike they will bunch, so at the beginning you will only meet the few who started early, and towards the end, the small number who started late. So the huts and campsites can be empty at the beginning and end but fill up around the middle.

South Island vs North Island?

If you have only limited time, the South Island is the more spectacular, more back country part of the total Te Araroa Trail. The North Island certainly has its moments, but it does involve more road walking, less time away from civilisation, and takes a little longer. I have walked the full South Island trail in one go, and the North Island in sections.

Between Camp Stream and Crooked Spur huts, South Island

Why Through-Hike?

Well, it’s a matter of personal choice, but it seems to me that if you want to say you have walked the Te Araroa Trail, you need to have walked all of it. Many people pick and choose sections, and no doubt by leaving out the boring bits that gives them a more enjoyable experience. Some, particularly Kiwis who can’t get enough days off work, do a section at a time, and by adding them all together eventually get to say they’ve done the TA. Others doing them in sequence regularly go off-trail for supplies and rest. Or simply stay another day or two at a nice spot. And others again, particularly the majority who are visiting from overseas, might want to see a bit more of New Zealand than simply the TA, and head off on diversions here and there. There is a trail saying, ‘Hike your own hike’, meaning there is no right or wrong way and you shouldn’t judge people who are doing it differently from yourself. My approach to the South Island was to do it in one continuous hike, walking every single metre, and so that’s the way I’ve written this guide: for through hikers. Hence it covers the whole she-bang, including the sometimes tedious bits of road between back country trails. But I’m sure it will also be useful for people who want to do sections only as well.

Kapiti Is from Waikanae Beach, North Island

Why This Guide?

I have written it because the official guides are not so well suited for through-walkers going north. The southbound guides have a good amount of information but because they are oriented towards the greatest number of users (section hikers) a lot is repeated and bits between sections are left out. Using the guides in reverse, as I did, is quite tricky. The official northbound guides (at the time of writing, for the South Island only) are better, but their layout is still not space efficient, meaning there is more paper to carry than you need and they have not been updated since 2017. They also exclude details of accommodation, transport and options for going off-trail, requiring you to go to the southbound guides for that anyway. So the pages here offer the best planning and take-with-you NoBo guide I am aware of.

How are the Guides Written?

My guides are divided up into sections of approximately eight hours walking a day. These are generally between places where you can stay the night. But because towns, huts and campsites are not evenly spaced eight hours apart, there are parts where some days are longer and a few are very short, effectively turning these into rest days (‘nero days’ – near zero – or zero days, in trail jargon).

Times of each section are the actual times it took me. They include short rest stops every hour or hour and a half, but exclude lunch breaks. I would say I was walking at a fairly average speed. The schedule of days is based upon a strategy of sending food parcels ahead at nearly every opportunity, which meant there were no off-trail trips that added extra time. But it did mean a lot of work organising before departure.

The guide assumes you are using the official TA maps, so for the sake of brevity, not every twist and turn of the trail is covered. In many places you can manage with the maps only. Also, to keep the text short, comment on the landscape and its history has unfortunately had to be kept to a bare minimum. There is a little more in the TA guide notes and on the Department of Conservation (DoC) website as well as in the DoC brochures that cover some sections. See the Links page for these and other sources of information.

I have been reluctant to add in accommodation prices and transport timetables because these will always change, but some are included as indicative. Please check them if you are going to rely on them. And feel free to send through updated information.

How to Use the Guides

You can print out the guides. I’ve deliberately not included pretty pictures in the guide pages so you don’t have images taking up space. And you can send them as printed instalments to yourself on the trail with food parcels to further cut weight. As with the maps, once you’ve finished with them they are good for starting fires, or you can leave them in huts for other people. If you have an e-book reader there is software online to convert pages to the file format required. Or you can save them to your cellphone. There are several routes to either printing or cellphone saving:

You can just print the web pages as they are of course. Or you can download them to your computer as pdf files (for offline viewing, later printing, or perhaps to transfer to your phone). To make the pdfs, start by printing the web pages but choose ‘print to pdf’ as your printer and save the file. Go to ‘more settings’ if the font looks too big or small and select a particular percentage rather than ‘default’ under ‘Scale’. You can also adjust margins (useful if you want to have a wide left for making notes, say), and create headers with page numbers, etc. I’d definitely add page numbers, either this way or by hand if you are going to carry the pages as print-outs with you.

If you are just going to read the guides on your phone then I recommend saving the web pages offline. In the Chrome browser on your phone click the three dots at top right, then select the download arrow symbol. If this doesn’t appear, try ‘more tools’. To later reload the page offline, select Downloads from the three dots menu. On iPhones using Safari, first make sure that under Settings and Safari that Reading List is set with Automatically Save Offline on. When you have the web page you want to save displaying in Safari then select the icon with the arrow over a square at the bottom of the screen and then scroll down to ‘Add to Reading List’. To later retrieve the page offline, just select the open book icon at the bottom of the Safari screen and select the saved page. I strongly suggest testing that you have indeed saved an offline version with either the Chrome or Safari browser by going offline, perhaps even restarting your phone as well, to simulate being on the TA trail with no cellphone signal or wifi.

Finally, you can copy and paste the pages into your usual word processor and print out the pages, or again save them to your phone. This method will lose some of my formatting but it allows you to make your own edits.

The core component of this site are the day-by-day walking guides. But there is lots more here. And there is of course the official website, which you should visit if you are going to take up the Te Araroa challenge.

Updates

The TA Trust issues revisions to the route each year around September and I incorporate these into my pages soon afterwards. You can check the bottom of each page to see when I’ve last updated it. The official TA maps and the notes were updated at 18 Aug 2023 (despite the fact that the notes each state ‘last updated Feb 2022’!)  Nevertheless, some of the accommodation info in these notes is not current. I have now updated my guide notes for 2023/24 for route changes and added a few things in from the official notes.

On the subject of updates, Covid-19 meant that overseas tourist numbers crashed. Many accommodations closed and bus and train services were often run on reduced hours or days. Visitor numbers were still only at 64% of pre-Covid levels in Feb 2023 and while some accommodations and services have returned, others have not. It is an evolving situation and I try to keep up with who is open and what services are operating, but do always check yourself.

And also for this season (2023-24) note that NIWA is expecting an El Niño weather pattern to dominate. This means colder temperatures in the winter, and dry conditions in the east (Otago and Canterbury) during summer. The chance of tropical cyclones dumping large amounts of rain on the east of the North Island (including Auckland) that were experienced in the first half of 2023 are reduced. NIWA issue a quarterly long range outlook which can be worth looking at.

Good hiking!

Athol McCredie, 29 February 2024

Members of Hutt Valley Tramping Club on Tarn Ridge, Tararua Range, 1942, by Ian Powell, National Library of NZ (PA1-o-651-08)