A Father, A Son, A Finished Chapter

The water taxi from Torea Bay was a quiet ride. The rain had eased to a fine, persistent drizzle, the kind that the Marlborough Sounds seem to issue as a baseline rather than a weather event, and the boat moved through the grey water past hillsides that we had walked along yesterday in conditions that had nearly broken us. From the comfort of the cabin, with our packs piled on the deck and our gear still half damp from the Portage, the Sounds looked beautiful in a subdued, melancholy way. The bush rising green from the water. The cloud sitting low on the ridges. The occasional bay opening into view, sheltered and still. It was the country we would have walked through, seen now from the water rather than the trail, and the change of perspective had the strange effect of making the hike feel both more real and more finished than it had felt in the hotel room the night before.

Picton arrived. The marina, the small streets, the InterCity bus stop where we had begun this northern leg of the trip what felt like months ago but had been only days. We boarded the bus to Christchurch with the resigned, quiet air of travellers in transit, packs stowed, seats found, the long drive south stretching ahead.

On the bus, we got chatting with a young woman from the UK who had been on the same water taxi as us that morning. She had also been hiking the Queen Charlotte Track, and she had also been rained out, the same weather system that had ripped our fly and broken Torrin's pack having driven her off the trail with similar finality. There was a particular kind of camaraderie in the conversation, the shared recognition between hikers who have been beaten by the same storm, and the kilometres to Christchurch passed more easily for the company. She, it turned out, was heading to the same hostel we had booked. Lylo, near the airport, the practical choice for travellers with early morning flights.

Lylo was very, very nice. After weeks of huts with dirt floors and tent sites and the cooking shelter at Camp Bay, the hostel felt like genuine luxury, modern and clean and well designed in a way that hostels in our experience rarely managed. We dropped our packs and settled in, the strangeness of the day's transition settling around us. This morning we had been on a water taxi in the Marlborough Sounds. Tonight we would sleep in a bed near Christchurch Airport. Tomorrow we would be in Australia. The compression of distance that modern travel performs is something the body never quite reconciles with, particularly when the journey it is undoing took weeks to make on foot.

We went out for our last meal in New Zealand. McDonald's. There was something fitting about it, the unceremonious end to a journey that had begun with such ambition. No celebratory dinner at a fine restaurant. No final toast over local wine and a view of the Southern Alps. Just two tired hikers eating burgers under fluorescent lights, the trip finishing the way it had occasionally been sustained, with cheap, hot, immediate food and the simple pleasure of not having to cook it ourselves.

The early morning came faster than we wanted it to. A six o'clock flight meant a four o'clock alarm, the dark, disoriented shuffle through the hostel and across to the airport with packs that felt strange now in a different context, no longer instruments of self-sufficiency in the backcountry but simply oversized luggage in a transit hub. Brisbane airport welcomed us back to Australia with long delays through customs, the queues winding and patient, the bureaucratic friction that travel always seems to generate at exactly the moment when you most want to be home. The delays meant missing the direct train to Gympie, the connection that would have taken Anth most of the way home in a single ride, but a redirected route to Nambour appeared, and Sal would meet us there in the bus.

And so it ended. Not with the photograph at Stirling Point in Bluff that every TA hiker carries in their imagination, but with a delayed customs queue and a redirected train and Sal waiting at a station on the Sunshine Coast.

Sitting on that train, watching the Queensland countryside slide past, the whole arc of the trip settled around us with a clarity that the daily grind of hiking had never quite allowed. It had begun, for Anth, weeks ago at Annie and Simon's place, where Torrin had arrived after his long journey from Cape Reinga and the top of the South Island, and where Anth had joined him to begin the southbound chapter together. Annie and Simon, who had welcomed us in with the warmth that good people always seem to extend to thru-hikers who turn up at their door, had set the tone for everything that followed. The trail had begun in their living room, in conversation and shared meals and the small, important rituals of preparation, before it had begun on the ground.

From there, St Arnaud and Lake Rotoiti, the first steps of our South Island walk, Anth's body protesting and the mind catching up. Travers Saddle and the rest stops every twenty metres, the quiet humiliation of a fitness gap that the trail had since mostly closed. Angelus Hut at the lake under the stars, one of the most beautiful nights of our lives. The blue river crossings of Waiau Pass. The rain that had closed Deception Gorge and the train that had carried us past country we would never get to walk. Hanmer Springs and the hot pools. Tim's twenty-thousand-hectare merino station and the impromptu detour to Lake Coleridge. The sixty creek crossings before Comyns Hut and the hidden creeks beneath the tussock that had drawn blood from our legs. Edmund Hillary's signature on the wall of Double Hut, written in 1951, two years before Everest. The frozen tent at Buicks Bridge. The feral pig that would not be intimidated by rocks. The Potts River discoloured and impassable. The pivot from south to north when the snow closed the mountains, the difficult acceptance that the southbound journey was over for now. The Queen Charlotte Track in the rain, the wekas stealing Birkenstocks, the sandflies at Camp Bay, the seventy-kilometre-per-hour gusts that ripped the fly at Bay of Many Coves, and the storm-driven slog to the Portage that had finally said enough.

It was not a complete trail. The line on the map was unfinished, broken in two places by weather and circumstance, and the final stretch to Bluff remained as a promise to ourselves rather than an achievement. But what we had walked was extraordinary. Hundreds of kilometres through some of the most beautiful and demanding country in the world. Mountains crossed and rivers forded and huts shared with strangers. The slow, accumulated transformation of a body that had arrived unprepared and finished capable, and the deeper, less measurable transformation of a relationship that had been tested and strengthened in ways that ordinary life never quite manages to do.

A father and a son had walked into the South Island and walked out again, and the son was no longer just the boy Anth had raised but a young man whose competence and patience and quiet generosity had been on display every day for weeks, and the father was no longer just the man Torrin had grown up with but a hiking partner who had earned his place on the trail through stubbornness and slow improvement and the willingness to keep walking when stopping would have been easier. We had found each other again, in the way that adult parents and adult children sometimes do when the right conditions allow it, and the trail had been those conditions.

We would come back. Maybe in a year. Maybe in two. Maybe in three. The unfinished sections would wait. Te Araroa is not a trail that disappears, and the part of it that we had not walked would still be there when we were ready, the same passes and rivers and huts standing patient in the mountains while life happened elsewhere. And when we returned, we would walk those final kilometres together, and the line on the map would be closed, and the loop that this trip had left open would finally complete itself.

But that was the future. For now, there was a train rolling north toward Nambour, and Sal waiting at the station, and the quiet, deep tiredness of two people who had been somewhere extraordinary and were, at last, coming home.Read more