The tramp part two
Day Four – Tutuwai Hut to Kaitoke and the track end The evening of day three, we realised we had a problem. We had scheduled our pickup at the trail end for 1pm on day four. While this was easily achievable based on DOC’s estimation of a 4.5 hour hike, our track record wasn’t looking good for making the pickup on time. So we set our alarms for 6am – before dawn. Ouch. So, after bashing round the dark hut at zero dark thirty in the morning making porridge and getting our stuff together, we set off at first light. Unlike the 3rd days hiking, the last days track became not exactly easy very quickly as it wound along the bluffs above the river. Sometimes the track barely scraped the cliff edges, and at other times it dropped quickly down into ravines with streams at the bottom that we needed to ford, and then climbed up steep scrambles of hillsides. It was beautiful, but hard, hard work, and we were all tired out from our …