Before the sun rose, I had my gear packed and was standing on a pebble beach, ready to begin a 45-kilometer Big Day.
In the pitch-black night sky where it took minutes for my eyes to make out my own fingers, guided by the beam of my headlamp, I moved forward with the rhythm of the waves.
As dawn broke, I reached the mountain trail just as daylight gave me enough visibility to clearly navigate my direction and path, climbing into the forest on the other side. By midday, I was drawing close to the small town.
When I stepped onto the beach of the next section, it was high tide—the narrow shoreline forced me to walk along the water’s edge, but as I continued downward, the tide gradually receded, the sea yielding me increasingly more space, and we maintained an unspoken distance from each other.
The sunset over the horizon was captivating, and I was fortunate to witness it in its entirety. Every shift in the sky’s color was imprinted in my memory.
For these six months, I have been living like this with nature, letting daylight and weather dictate my rhythm, becoming a primitive and simple human being devoted to walking and living.
This may be the first time in my nearly thirty years of living on this land that I’ve begun to truly learn how to coexist with it, consciously realizing that as a human, I am part of a cycle within the simple elements of sunlight, air, and water.
This single day’s routine is a microcosm of my six months—three days away from the end of the Te Araroa Trail. To avoid the foul weather forecast for the next day that would have me dancing with the waves in wind and rain, I compressed two days’ worth of distance into one, from darkness to daylight and back to darkness.
Waking with the sea, the sun, and the grassland, traveling alongside birds and sheep, making the forest and mountains my home. These things have always existed as if routine, yet only now do I regard them as my daily life.
They’ve always been there; we simply kept our distance from them.
—–
(Reflecting on a journal entry from May 25, 2017)
📍 Te Araroa Trail | New Zealand 3,000 Kilometer Hiking Journal| Back to full series index
