Waitomo to te kuiti

"follow orange markers SE across open farmland" was when I regretted posting home the binoculars. Lovely morning, karst landscape, and I needed the compass to find my way out of this valley.

Worse, when I did find it, the local boys weren't having a bar of it.

Twenty Jersey bulls, sex starved and bored, famously toey (aggressive), bellowing their heads off meet my definition of scary monsters. 

This display is straight out of a behaviour textbook and says something like "my fierce horns have been turned away but I will spin on my forelegs and skewer you in microseconds if you don't back off". 

You have to admire the passive aggression of the farmer. The route is probably a paper road that was exhumed for Te Araroa. Hereford bulls wouldn't threaten walkers. 

I stood on the coward's side of the gate, pondering my options long enough to see movement in the distance. The couple of section walkers from Pahautea Hut were closing the gap, promising safety in numbers. He said, "One of my mates was mauled by bulls" and she said, "My pack is red"  I smothered reason (no cases of three people killed by herd of bulls, bovidae have sparse cone populations of the retina) and joined them in a gorse walk around the outer fenceline. 

We bashed over a bushy ridge and found ourselves on a south-facing spur. The route from here took us down to Pehitawa Forest on the banks of Mangapu River. It's the block of trees in the left of the photo. 

And what trees! When Captain Cook saw kahikatea trunks like this upriver from Te Aroha, he told the Admiralty they had all the ships spars they'd ever need. Wrong. The wood is soft and susceptible to borer. 

I was wandering along thinking about this when an odd sensation tickled the part of my brain that checks the left foot. 

That would be the feeling of a tab failing, cut through by the new lace. And the right hand lace is thinning, did I say? Note to self to ask NOH to post next set of footwear. 

Your modern shepherd mightn't ride a hoss, but this one was "feeling it" after a 24 hour challenge (or was it 12?) yesterday. 

Finally, Te Kuiti was in view. 

I worked from Te Kuiti for two months in 1999 during post-election negotiations that brought Helen Clark to power. As I returned from fieldwork and refueled each day, the man at the garage would say, "no news yet" and save me the price of a paper.

Brook Park has lovely trees, including these London planes. The railway shaped a lot of local history and I will return to visit this restored railway cottage on the main street. 

Today I made do with a beer at the train station, now a terrific café. Not for me "... a cup of tea at Te Kuiti..."