I have included plenty of advice throughout my pages, and most of it you will find elsewhere too. But now I am going to share some of the things I’ve learned from my own experience. So these are my special personal tips.

Mind and Body
My most popular page is the one on gear. The one I call ‘Your Body’ is well down the rankings and ‘Your Mind’ is at bottom. But nobody fails to complete the TA because they didn’t have the right gear (unless they were just carrying too much stuff). Walking the Te Araroa Trail is a mental challenge above all. It requires determination, stick-ability and being able to live with your thoughts a lot of the time. It is your mind that will get you through, even with terrible gear and poor fitness. OK, this isn’t exactly a tip, but more of a reminder.

Carry a water bag
Often it is hard to know how much water you will need for the day. Rather than carry several water bottles that you may or may not fill up on a given day, you can save weight and space of empty bottles by using a collapsible bottle – one of those pouches with a regular screw top. After a collapsible bottle I also carry a ‘just in case’ stiff, plastic zip-lock bag for storing water. Like the sort in which you get freeze dried meals – and practically everything else these days. It weighs almost nothing, and takes up no room when empty. It is not as leak-proof as a proper bottle, so when I have water in mine I always carry it in an outside pocket of my pack so a leak doesn’t spell total disaster.

Drink water before setting out
Speaking of water, you can save some weight by drinking plenty before you start out so you don’t need to carry so much. There is only so much the body can absorb though and some of it will go straight through, so you will need to pee fairly early on into your hike.

Take a spare spoon
Spoons get lost easily and the plastic ones break. I always carry two.

Take matches and extra striker pads
You might rely on a cigarette lighter but these can easily leak fuel. Matches weigh nothing and are a good back-up. Cut the sides off several boxes so you have plenty of striker pads. These wear out more quickly than you will use up matches.

Dry socks on the go
Socks are the things I wash the most often, but they are slow to dry. If you sew loops on their tops you can attach them to your pack and dry them as you walk.

Dry clothes and shoes indoors at night
These will dry outside in a good breeze in the daytime, but don’t expect much drying in the night. I bring shoes and clothes inside then as the wind often drops at this time and the temperature always goes down. It will be warmer inside (and warmer and dryer air will be higher up, nearest the ceiling). Mini clothes pegs or even paper clips can be useful, as they enable you to hang a garment fully extended. It takes longer to dry something that is folded over on itself.

Wear sun gloves
You know how old people’s hands are wrinkly and dotted with large brown spots? That’s sun damage. I wear fingerless gloves to keep the sun off the back of my hands and to make holding poles more comfortable (ones with suede padding on the palm are good here). OR make them, and Macpac is now selling them too. You can buy fancy ones at fishing stores with suede padding. There are fingerless cycle gloves and heavier yachting gloves (to prevent rope burn) too. I could just put sun cream on my hands, you say. Yes, but I don’t like smearing sticky stuff all over my skin, and carrying a tube of sun cream is more weight. You can also get arm shades (again, both OR and Macpac sell them), as well as ones for the legs (or you can just repurpose arm shades for the legs). The OR arm shades are quite heavy and you may as well just wear a long-sleeved shirt as buy their arm shades. But others are lighter.

Choose colourful gear
You may have seen bits of clothing and other gear left at huts and campsites or dropped on the trail. What colour is it? Often black. Choose brightly coloured options, paint, or tie bright ribbons on them. I threw out my black wallet without realising when clearing up my rubbish in Twizel. I had to cancel my credit card and so on. I was at my wits end until I thought to look through the rubbish sacks the hostel had left out back for collection and found the wallet in one. All because it was hard to notice. And I have left my poles behind on two or three occasions. They were black and look like everyone elses. Painting the top part orange solved that, but I think I would stick on brightly coloured reflective tape if I was doing it again in case I needed to walk at night. Easier than spray painting them too.

Save phone battery
I have said this elsewhere, but if you are not near a wifi source turn wifi off, and likewise Bluetooth. If you don’t need GPS all the time, turn off location. And if there is no cellphone reception or if you don’t need to send or receive calls, turn of phone reception as well. All these things are constantly working to find signals, and thereby using battery power, even when you are not actively using them.

Pad hiking poles for hard ground
Using poles on roads and sealed footpaths can jar your wrist and can make your hands numb. The rubber end caps that come with the poles will prevent this but are heavy. I use a drill to make a hole part way into a wine bottle cork instead and poke this onto the end of my poles. They stay on well and are very light. They are a bit more slippery on asphalt than rubber and will wear a bit, but I managed all of Northland with just one set, and there is a lot of road walking there.

Chose multipurpose gear
Look at each thing you are planning to carry and think of how many purposes it can serve. Some things like an PLB have only one purpose (to save you in an emergency), but others, like a smartphone, can do lots of things. So can duct tape or medical tape. A cooking pot can be used for eating and drinking out of as well as cooking, a towel can be a scarf. And so on.

Soak food
You can save a lot of cooking time (and hence the amount of fuel you carry) if you soak food first when you have an hour or more before dinner time.

Forget about a stove
Some things, when soaked long enough, don’t need cooking at all – like dried peas and some pulses, couscous, and of course dried mashed potato, which mixes up as well cold as hot. Think about how many occasions a stove will be already provided (motorcamps, hostels, etc) or takeaways are available, and consider if you can manage with cold food those other times.

Take multivitamins
Your diet is going to be pretty poor at times and the demands on your body high. Help it with vitamins. And eat fresh food whenever you can find it.

Forage
Depending on the time of year, you may find fruit and blackberries growing along the roadsides and tracks. If the fruit is not quite ripe, cook it up. Some people fish, and mussels can often be pulled from rocks at low tide when you are on the coast (mainly Auckland/Northland). Though, like fish, cooking them is a hassle. Edible weeds, like plantain, are plentiful in some places. Get a book on foraging and experiment before you start the trail.

Keep your sleeping bag moisture free
When it is really cold it is tempting to huddle into the hood of your sleeping bag but you should be aware that breathing into the bag adds moist air from your lungs that reduces the insulating power of the down in it. Wearing a beanie is a better idea.

There is a similar issue with sleeping pads. Blowing them up with your mouth will add moist air, which reduces the insulating properties (and risks mould growth inside the pad). It is becoming more common now to blow up pads with an inflation device, but this is just more gear and weight to carry. I have tried filling a large plastic bag (my pack liner) with air and trying to squeeze it into my pad, but it is difficult to get this to work easily. A short connecting pipe would make the idea work better.

Also on this topic, your sleeping bag will contain moist air from your body in the morning. There usually isn’t much opportunity to let it dry out before you pack it up, but you can certainly make it one of the first things you unpack at the end of the day and lay out. Also, you should give it a good shake then so the down can fluff up. Otherwise, getting into a bag you have just unpacked will mean the down is both compressed and damp – not conducive to keeping warm at night.

Make or buy a backwarmer
Finally, you perceive cold most around your chest and at the small of your back. When it’s cold at night you might curl up in your sleeping bag and instinctively wrap your arms across your chest to keep warm there. But keeping your back warm is more difficult. One option is a, well, back warmer: a tube of polarfleece or similar. It is lighter to carry than a whole extra garment and targets the area you need warmed. Except that it will also, unnecessarily, warm your tummy. Target further and cut more weight by making something that has light-weight fabric at front and warm at back.

Lace shoes so they don’t come undone
There are many ways of tying laces. I give a link to a useful article in my Your Body page. One I use everyday now that prevents my laces unravelling but which is easy to undo is to wrap the loop round twice. So: start with the usual left over right. Then make loops in both laces and wrap the right loop around the left one twice. Simple.

Test your gear
For heaven’s sake, don’t buy your footwear or pack the day before you set out on the trail. I hear too many stories of people who found their footwear really uncomfortable after a few days and/or was causing multiple blisters. Sort this out before you start, and remember that your feet will swell, so don’t buy something that is too small. Walking around for an hour or two isn’t enough of a test. I tried my first boots out by walking an hour a day in them over rough terrain for a couple of weeks, but it wasn’t enough. It did reveal a niggle, but I didn’t realise that this would become almost a show-stopper later on. You need to hike 8 hours a day in 2 or 3 successive days, to find out if there are any problems. If you get blisters, then at least you will know where they are likely to form, so you can take pre-emptive measures in future by taping the area or using hikers wool, blister pads, or whatever.