An unexpected journey: hiker who spent lockdown in a hobbit hole

Louise Coghill was on the top of the world when its borders started to close.

For four months Coghill, a photographer from the Australian city of Perth, had been hiking the Te Araroa trail: 3,000km down the length of New Zealand, from Cape Reinga in the north to the southernmost point of Bluff.

Coghill had set out in November 2019. By early March she had made it to the Canterbury region of the South Island. The end of her journey was in sight, plus she had picked up a boyfriend, Marco – a Swiss hiker she had met along the way.

But each pocket of network coverage delivered worsening news of a