Hiking in Kaitoke Park

I just got back from a long day of hiking in Upper Hutt!  This morning a bunch of international students and I set off for the Wellington Railway Station and took the train to Upper Hutt, a suburb of Wellington. And while walking to the train station, I realized I had totally forgotten my wallet…. whoops! Luckily, one of my friends was nice and lent me some money for me to pay back for the train fare. We arrived at the Upper Hutt station about an hour later and hopped on the 112 bus, which takes you close to Kaitoke Park.

We got off the bus a little while later and walked up to the road where we thought the trail was… however we wound up in a place called Tunnel Gully which was definitely not where we were heading toward.  We stopped at the sign with a map of the park on it, and were immediately confused.  For some strange reason unknown to me, the makers of the map had flipped around the map to make north point downwards instead of upwards.  We eventually figured out that we had walked the wrong direction and had got off and the wrong bus stop… And got to walk a long way to find the correct trailhead!

We finally reached Kaitoke Park after asking for directions from a nice lady outside her house.  The trail began at a VERY steep incline and I was pretty out of breath.  I stopped to take pictures every once in a while…. but realized that I didn’t have my CF card in my camera and realized it was still sitting in my computer at home.  NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!  So I didn’t get to take any photographs of the amazing scenery on the trail today, which was VERY disappointing.  I had even been considering bringing along my point and shoot that morning but decided I didn’t need it.  Dumb idea.  So I hiked today without taking photographs.  Some of my friends took some photos and will probably put them on Facebook so at least I’ll have something.

Anyways, we took the Ridge Track through Kaitoke Park, which is about 7.5 km long.  It was a cloudy, drizzly day, but that worked out great because we didn’t feel so hot when traversing the ridge.  The trees around the trail were really awesome-looking, there were a lot of ferns and it reminded me of walking through a jungle/rain forest at times.  The beginning of the track may have been steep, but it leveled out after a while, then started a large decline towards the end.  Don’t do this trail if you aren’t in good physical shape.

After a few hours, we came across our main goal of our hike:  Rivendell.  The Lord of the Rings was filmed in Kaitoke Park around the river at the end of our trail.  It was basically just a small river, and was hard for me to tell what was in the movie, since it looked NOTHING like Rivendell in the movies.

Ummm… yeah not sure how they got this:

From this:

But it was a really nice river to stop at, there was a Maori family swimming in the river (one guy was washing his hair with shampoo hmmm)  and a few other families were hanging out.  There was also a cool swing bridge over the river that we HAD to go on!

After hanging out in Rivendell for a while, we decided it was time to leave.  However, we were stuck in a dilemma as how to get back, exactly.  We really did not want to take the Ridge Track back because the incline would be EXTREMELY strenuous and we were already tired from walking all day.  The bus did not go all the way up to the Rivendell entrance.  A taxi would have been kind of expensive, plus we didn’t have a number for a taxi service and didn’t know if they even came up to where we were.  And walking back via the highway would have been pretty long and we might not get back to the bus stop where we began our trip in time.

Solution?  Hitchhiking.  Since we had such a large group (9 people) we split up into three groups of one guy and two girls (for safety of course)… started walking along the road and stuck our thumbs out.  The first group of us actually walked up to some people in the parking lot and got a ride from them.  The rest of us walked along the road, with Alex, Freya and Emily ahead and Bill, Amanda and I following behind.  After walking about 15 or 20 minutes, a car pulled over and let us for a ride.  It was a French couple who had been living in New Zealand for two years.  They were very nice, and kept speaking French in the front seat.  I wish I could remember more French from high school.  They even took us right to the Upper Hutt train station.  We were happy we got lucky with such a good ride.

Bill, Amanda and I walked to a cool cafe called Mayfair (which used to be a movie theatre back in the silent film days) where I ordered a delicious passionfruit and mango milkshake.  Freya, Emily and Alex arrived in Upper Hutt soon after us.  They got a ride with a mom and her twelve-year-old daughter.  Leah, Lizzy and Jarad arrived last.  Even though they got a ride before any of us, they were only dropped off at the bus station where we had been originally!  So they had to take the bus the remainder of the way to downtown Upper Hutt.  After hanging out in the cafe for a bit, we looked at the time and realized that the train back to Wellington would leave in about 5 minutes or we would have to wait another hour, so we finished up our milkshakes and raced back to the railway station!  We made the train right on time.  I sat on the left and watched the scenery go by.

It was an awesome day, I’m pretty tired from all of that walking however.  Hitchhiking was an interesting experience, I’ve never done it before.  I feel like I should go back and take photographs sometime since the scenery was so awesome.  Maybe someday!

We did Rivendell this weekend, and next weekend we are heading to Mordor to visit Mt. Doom.  Also known as the Tongariro Crossing, of course.  And I’m not forgetting my wallet or CF card this time!!!

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