Walk the trail

Wednesday we get up early. We are going to walk a trail. My auntie is leading a walking group and we are invited to join them today. We fill our backpack with water, lunch and a jacket. We put on our tracking boots. The fun thing is that this is a real kiwi walk, we don’t follow a track for tourists but a track that the people that live here walk, no signs where to go.
We leave in time and drive to Taylors mistake. There are in total 15 people today. The group walk every Wednesday, if the weather isn’t too bad. The ages are between 50 and 80 years old. I’m almost the youngest, only my cousin is younger. A lot of the people use walking sticks, we are going to do it without.
We start at the beach, which is black sand, at the end of the beach we go up on rocks and stones that forms a sort of stairs. The climbing begins. This is very different from a Dutch walk. We go up and down and up again and so on. In the beginning the path is about a meter wide and shingles. On one side is the mountain and on the other side we see the sea deep below us, at some places a hundred meters or more, right beside the path. Okay, I’m not walking on the edge of it but certainly not glued to the mountain. The path changes in a sort of goats trail, sandy, rocky or just stones. Up and down, we miss a path and go down through the field, not even a goats trail! And straight down. More rocks, deep steps but then we are at our first short stop for morning tea, Boulder Bay. The stop is on sea level, down the cliff. We drink some water and eat a bit. There are batches, you can only get here walking, there is no road. But batches are for holidays and weekends when you want to go fishing or just relax.
We go on and have to go up again, a steep small path. It is raining a bit, but not disturbing and it gets dry pretty soon. The view over the Pacific is really amazing. We see a lot of flowering plants, the kiwi’s tell us that even they have never seen so many of them. We are lucky, the flowers are very beautiful. We get back on the wide path, sometimes we have a short cut but not many. A few of the elder people take a different route, because it is a wee bit easier than the one we are following, but as Ad says, we paid for the whole route, so we walk the whole route