BIKES AND BOOTS

I SAID NO. I said no over and over, but he wouldn’t listen. He didn’t understand that the words Heaphy Track meant mud, rain, pain, sandflies and discomfort. I mean, I know about this stuff. I was born and brought up in New Zealand, where grown men and women flinch at those two little words.

The Heaphy Track is a walk (or tramp, as Kiwis call it) of 78.4km (48.7 miles), from the top left corner of the South Island, through extraordinary terrain of the Kahurangi National Park, to the wild West Coast. Of all New Zealand’s multi-day tramps it’s considered to offer the toughest, most remote, wettest and most sandfly-infested week of your life. ‘Doing the Heaphy’ was a rite of passage for Kiwi trampers, a muddy badge worn with pride. So when Duncan read that it had three new huts, a massively improved trail, bridges over the many rivers, and had been opened to shared use between walkers and bikers, he suggested we have a go. I didn’t swallow it. It was still the Heaphy, and it was definitely going to rain.

Duncan won the argument, in part because I was inspired by the enlightened attitude of the Department of Conservation (DoC) to shared use trails. Apart from