Fungi and intro to mud

January 6th
Colac Bay to Martin's Hut
Distance: 16km
Elevation: gain 420m
Steps: 30,000 

By the end of yesterday afternoon, we were both rearing to go. We had our trail legs on again, you might say! So when we woke up with the dawn, we looked at each other and decided to carry on with the trail.

The day's walk started with a few km along a road, and gave us idyllic "New Zealand" views
and we could see our future on the horizon

The path then veered into forest, that we stayed in for the rest of the day.

It is beautiful forest!
but not without its challenges for us
And the forest comes with its own warning: Don't step off the path!

This forest is infamous for its mud, but we were very lucky with our timing, having had several dry days before we started in. Unfortunately, that means that the water supply at the hut has also gone dry, so we will be using our water purifier and some stream water tomorrow.

The trail is very well marked. Very. Like, we're pretty sure that the person who put up the orange markers for the trail used to work in traffic management in Auckland. We must have passed 500 of these today...

We decided not to stay in the first hut we passed, its really more of a shelter and historic hut...
So we are happily staying at Martin's Hut:

The other thing we saw a lot of today was plantlife, of all kinds, but the multiple types of fungus just really blew us away!
It felt good to be on our legs and on the trail again. 

Comments

  1. PaulJanuary 10, 2022 at 7:53 AM

    Nice progress this week Team Turner! And nice blog. Back to work today; hopefully no blisters here arising from typing ill-thought responses to the 46 items in Triage. I've downloaded the GoogleEarth file of the TA Track, which will surely be useful for learning SI geography for quiz answers. Good luck with the legs and feet and you'll surely be back to more 40km/day fun.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. VaughanJanuary 18, 2022 at 5:45 PM

      Thanks mate! Hope the first week was a gentle re-entry into the work year. I'm not envious of opening the work inbox first day back in the new year. We're learning that a digital version of the trail does not always match up with the orange markers. Our mantra has become"trust the markers".

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