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The Dutch lovers got up early and were gone by 7am. I got out of my sleeping bag, rolled a joint, slightly warmed some water on my stove, made a coffee and sat on the verandah. The sandflies descended en masse and started drilling their beaks into any uncovered skin. They coated my toes and ankles, suckling away. You reach a point with sandflies and just start wildly slapping at yourself. They are relentless. I get extreme satisfaction when I squish one and it is full of blood and makes a little pop. I feel an odd disappointment and confusion when I kill one after it’s been slurping on my skin, and then it has no blood inside. It’s not like they particularly hurt but eventually you do feel as if you are being eaten alive. The rare itchy ones are the worst. These sandflies definitely detract from the experience. They certainly test some sort of resilience.

Today I walk to the famous Trevor Carter Hut. Brendon spoke of this hut with a deep fondness. Last time he’d lived in the forest he’d stayed in TCH. The Dutch lovers who don’t cuddle mentioned it in almost every sentence they spoke. They told me it takes six hours to get there. Let’s see.

I went inside and got my roll of toilet paper and took it outside with my water bottle and sat it down beside the water tank. When I went to pick it up and go to the long drop it had gone. A Weka has stolen my only roll of toilet paper. I searched in the bushes around the hut for several minutes to no avail. Aside from feeling guilty that a Weka is trailing toilet paper through the pristine forest I now have no toilet paper. I’ll use my hand like an Indian, like Philipp suggested when I was packing my bag.

The track was unrelenting today and I felt completely smothered by the forest. At one point I felt unwelcome and spooked and I had to leave the marked track and walk along the hideous river bed terrain of loose rocks of every shape and size just to get out of the forest and see the sky. I arrived at Trevor Carter Hut much earlier than the predicted six hours. The only reason I remembered my estimated arrival time today was because it was 4:20. TCH is nice with views down the valley and a nearby river that has huge boulders in it. I took off all my clothes and got naked and dove into the water. I immediately got out of the river and lay naked in the hot sun on the biggest rock in the river. I realized my dick never gets to see the sun.

I am now smack bang in the middle of the track. Days either side of me to get to a dirt road and who knows how long till civilization. I feel good. I can’t do much except exist and keep walking along the track. I didn’t meet any other walkers today. The only other human I saw was a young guy wearing a checkered red shirt and scooping anchovies out of a can with a slice of white bread. We spoke very briefly in which time I thanked him for looking after the huts. There were others inside renovating too, but we did not speak. I moved along. I reached a sign that advised I could take a low water route. The Dutch guys had told me this was an option and I could make the trip shorter if I took the river. As a result I lopped at least 45 minutes off my trip. My shoes are now wet for the first time due to river crossings and swamp conditions.

I am all alone in the hut for the first time. Naturally, I have masturbated several times. I have no chocolate left.
I thought I would feel different in this profound isolation. Am I meant to have some sort of epiphany? I actually crave to join a bunch of other people on a more mainstream track. I look forward to joining the TA. I’m in this forest for three more days I think.

I slept well through the night till 7:20am. I thought it would be scary to be in the actual middle of nowhere and all alone in the hut but it wasn’t at all aside from the times I imagined someone hanging from the beech tree out the front.

Today I will walk my first “route” – a less walked and unmaintained track, marked by snow poles, over Biggs Topps. This is by far the hardest way to go but I can not bear to walk through the forest along the river again. It is also the fastest route for me to get out of this forest and into the arms of a hot Israeli soldier in Nelson Lakes.

I made a wish upon the first star I saw last night that I would meet my soulmate on this journey. I’m so ready. I think the star was a satellite in the end.

The following things played on my mind:

-Putting my wet shoes on in the cold valley morning and walking for five hours uphill.

-Could I be happy with Simon in Perth? We have known each other since we were 17 and have never been in love. He gave me a blow job once in his bedroom while we were on party pills and his boyfriend was downstairs watching TV in the lounge. Another time about seven years ago we went on holiday to Bali together and spent the entire week drinking magic mushroom shakes and doing dodgy drug deals in alleyways in Seminyak. He’s quite different to me and is likely an alcoholic. He loves money and owns a home and a BMW. We made a pact that if we were single at 35 we would get together and start a life. The time has arrived. I will revisit these thoughts.

Last night I took the hut book to bed and read the entries. Unbelievably the page I started from had an entry from Brendan. 16.10.14- “Just looking, sandflies still the same after 25 years”. Amazing.

I had been walking for ages, since 9am- it was now 2pm and I encountered my first other people for the day. A guy dressed in camo with a hunting rifle crossing a swing bridge which incidentally the pathway crossed under – an unusual occurrence at the best of time, but this time I had a huge gun pointing down at me through the swing bridge. He looked displeased to see me. He asked if I had come from Venus Hut, even though clearly I was walking towards it. I told him no, that’s where I’m going. He seemed shocked and announced that this track was closed because the huts were getting renovated. Another portly man showed up over the bridge wearing a singlet and carrying a fishing rod. Venus Hut is full he nonchalantly told me, of DOC staff who were flown in by helicopter this morning. I was rattled but just as one if the men started suggesting I turn back and stay at the hut I’d just come from – the one they had obviously planned some kind of broke back mountain adventure in- his friend cut him off and said I should just keep walking. In my mind I’d have to walk all the way to the next hut which would take me well into the night. I imagined myself sleeping in a clearing in the forest under the stars. It wasn’t going to rain and hadn’t been raining and I had enough layers to stay warm so I made peace with this as I planned in my mind to soldier on past the hut and not even talk to the army of DOC staff sleeping at Venus Hut. I get the feeling this huge forest is left mostly alone to the tiny handful of trampers who either live in the park like Brendon or random walkers like myself. Naturally meeting the only other two people in the forest all day telling me I wasn’t supposed to be there caused me to spend the next hour and a half worrying. Suddenly a hut appeared as they do and there were two pairs of boots in the sun on the verandah. I opened the door expecting to find 12 DOC staff in there feverishly renovating. Instead were two elderly gentleman with grey hair sitting at the table. I gawped at them for seconds before asking if it was just them here. When they said yes, they were alone and had been for days, I was overjoyed. I left the two old gay Dutch dudes and went and got naked and dived into the swimming hole ignoring the sixty billion sandflies eating my flesh. Something about deep water in a river makes me nervous so I couldn’t fully relax but I felt energised and clean and my sore toes appreciated the cold water I let run over them while I smoked some cones.

When I came back up to the hut I learned that my hut mates had studied together in the Netherlands some 50 years ago and go hiking together every year since. They are doing the same track as me but in the opposite direction. They are obviously secret gay lovers. so I said “you must be best friends and know each other very well after spending so much time alone in the forest together” one of them quickly said “what about you? Where are you from?” I wonder why they have never announced their love to the world. Their beds are on polar opposite ends of the shelf. There is obviously no cuddling.

I got my GoPro out and started filming. I got one of them in the frame and apologised saying “I’m going to make a video so I remember everything” and he replied “it’s all the same in the end”.

He is very cut for an old man. You can tell he was hot when he was younger. The other guy looks like a professor with white hair and black framed glasses and perfectly straight teeth (obviously not real). I asked what they studied 53 years ago. He said theology and philosophy. I asked what they had become after that. The two men had moved to a remote Indonesian island and spent years helping the villages grow food.

They mentioned casually that as teenagers they had hitch hiked around Europe but the conversation quickly turned to how much food one must carry on some hiking track in Italy. I glazed over immediately. I interrupted saying “I need to change the subject. Tell me about hitch hiking around Europe in the 60s” I got them reminiscing for a short while about a trip long forgotten. They had a few hearty laughs but the conversation turned quickly to the demise of tramping clubs leading to the neglect of the tramping network. I personally think it’s astonishing I can sleep in a hut in the remote forest for $5 a night.

Tomorrow I will get to Trevor Carter Hut. Both the gay dudes and Brendon speak fondly of this hut. I wouldn’t mind getting out of this forest into a more popular one with hot Israeli soldiers. I’m days away from the end of the trail.

It’s 7:30am and I have spent the night in Spludgeons Shelter – the entire front wall is a clear plastic sheet with a tin roof and dirt floor. There are 4 sleeping spots. The full moon shone incredibly brightly over the mountains and through the plastic wall and bathed me in light all night. My feet were sore after hours of walking in new shoes, but I’m very happy I decided to wear trail shoes and not boots.

Bathed in moonlight the following things played on my mind: I was unable to do my sleeping bag zipper up before it got dark and my incessant rustling would surely annoy my fellow hut mate. I’ve had this problem before when I was camping with Philipp. So there is a solution. For now it defeats the whole point of a sleeping bag to not zip it up.

I was pleased the moon was shining on me all night. The moon is probably very powerful and it will disappear soon, as it does.

My hut mate is from the UK and is spending 3 months inside Kahurangi NP wandering around by himself. I asked him why. He said it gave him time to think. I asked if he ever solved any of his problems. I didn’t catch his answer.

It took an incredibly long time to fix my zipper. The engineering process and thought behind this particular zipper make no sense to me. But I stayed calm and solved the problem and only said fuck twice.

There are more Weka than I’ve ever seen in this forest. I asked the UK guy why he thought the weka was so successful when the kiwi- a similar bird, was struggling. He opined that perhaps it was the place the Weka laid its eggs. As luck would have it there was a ‘wilderness’ magazine in the hut explaining that Weka lay their eggs in the grass – so surely this is not where their success lies.

After arriving at my proposed detour from the Leslie track where I’d planned to walk a route to Flannagans Hut – I noticed an old forestry department sign pointing up the hill. Someone had carved a line through the word route and chipped the word ‘horror’ into the wood. It must have taken a long time. Above the word horror someone had written the word ‘total’ in black vivid. Another person had carved a skull and crossbones. I carried along Leslie Track which undulates like an Indian step well along the river bank.

I arrived at Karamea Bend Hut – a huge modern hut that sleeps 20. Inside was one man laying on a mattress. I asked him how his day was. He replied good without looking up and went back to reading. He soon warmed to me and told me a lengthy story about how DOC spent 10 days in a helicopter in this part of the forest looking for a rare parrot. He seemed to have a strong dislike of this government department and referred to it as “those fat bastards”. I asked who had first seen the parrot to trigger this response but he didn’t know. I went swimming.

When I got back to the hut Brendon – who has a long pointy white goatee – asked if I’d seen the parrot. He offered the information that he was now living in the forest indefinitely so that he doesn’t kill the guy that his girlfriend of 28 years cheated on him with. Many of his friends died in tragic circumstances within 6 months of each other. He has anger management issues which trigger violent seizures. This helped him while he was in maximum security prison because he got to be in a medical ward where black power and mongrel mob do not regularly stab each other. He spent 2.5 years in maximum security for growing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of weed. I was surprised. Brendon speaks of jail as a fully paid holiday where he spent the best Christmas of his life making ice cream and cheesecake. I said it seems pointless to have sent you to prison because you speak of it fondly as if you might like to go back. He agreed it was pointless but does not grow weed any more because of the mental health stresses it causes. I asked if he’d rather be in the forest than in jail. He said that’s why I’m here.

We smoked his home grown tobacco – which he has been rolling in a paper map he had torn up – and some of my weed. I gave him a bunch of rolling papers. I asked him how he became a big time weed grower. He said it gave him satisfaction when he recruited solo parents on the benefit with children that then got to go to school camp because of the weed money. He told me he treated his dealers well and they would regularly enjoy smorgasbord together. Brendon spoke fondly of his miniature pony who was his most cherished staff member. One day he was smoking a joint and the pony came over and started sniffing around, so he cupped his hands around its mouth and gave the pony a shottie. The pony fell over onto its side. Brendon was shocked but the pony got up and asked brendon for another puff on the joint. This time it didn’t fall over. From then on whenever the pony would smell a joint it would come “flying across the paddock” and by the sound of it, practically beg to carry 40kg of weed growing equipment into the forest.

Brendon seems to have reflected on his relationship during the night. It is 7am and his stories are relentless. The next hut is 5.5 hours away. I like brendon but I’ll be glad to see the back of him. I hope there’s some hot backpackers somewhere in this forest.

With my food parcel strategically sent forwards to St Arnaud, I was to carry enough food for 9 days to get me from Richmond Ranges to my parcel then carry on walking a further 8 days to my next food box at Boyle. After many days my request to join the facebook Te Araroa group was approved, and the first message was alerting me to the fact that due to high fire risk the entry points to the ranges are closed. I called the DOC office and a kindly woman advised it was still possible to enter from Pelorus River, but this is quite difficult to get to from Nelson (probably possible though- everything is) and once on the trail, all exit points are closed. She said if a fire starts in the valleys below I would be trapped. I don’t know what “closed” actually means, I guess a sign nailed to a fence post, but I feel like it would be churlish to ignore this advice. There is nothing that appeals to me about burning alive, I feel it would be quite horrific. To the rescue, it seems, is “nearby” (a 35km gravel road suitable for 4 wheel drive from Motueka) Kahurangi National Park. NZ’s second largest NP. Nobody ever talks about this place and it seems there is little info online about it. I figure they don’t just make national parks for the fun of it. But there is a 9 day walk – Leslie-karamea/Whangapeka track which will end with me on a desolate road 83km from St Arnaud. This makes me nervous, as I am carrying no tent or shelter, but I figure if darkness approaches I can retrace my steps to the last hut? We’ll see what happens. At this rate the South Island may very well sink into the ocean such is this insane summer weather.

I await the arrival of my new backpack today, If it doesn’t show up I will be bitterly disappointed. The journey starts from Whangarei at 6:30am tomorrow.