trampers not paying their way

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My two cents: Te Araroa is the absolute worst thing to happen to New Zealand tramping. The number of people is the root of most of the issues this thread is addressing. More people = more problems; simple, really. Despite a person's personal feelings about DoC, they've been on the back foot for keeping up with the wear and tear on the tracks/huts/infrastructure that the explosion of TA walkers brings. TA was conceived and promoted mostly without DoC's involvement, and now they're in the deep, especially after 9 years of budget and staff cuts. As for people coming and going on the forum, it's a forum: let it be.

These problems are inevitable when NZ Governments are striving to boost tourism numbers by (what seems to me to be) highly unsustainable numbers every year. I do see locals acting as badly as the badly-behaved tourists all the time. I think a sense of "entitlement" is a probably underlying cause of that. When you are grateful for the resource - the tracks and the huts, and the presence of a rescue network, I think you appreciate those things a lot more.

the TA isnt run by DOC or being promoted by them... and its being promoted internationally on general tourism sites. the TA trust are, they are nothing to do with DOC, it was one person driving it and its gone viral. without enough planning , there arent the resources to cope with the tracks its going on.. DOC could start making some of the huts on the TA bookable... that would really stuff up the TA because they often get up to three times as many people as bunks in the smaller huts at present and getting worse each year. overseas they have far greater resources to put into the tracks but do experience overcrowding issues as well. on the pacific crest trail you have to have a permit and they are in limited numbers. no permit, no access to those tracks on the trail, at least in summer, a lot of the more popular tracks are under a lot of snow in winter and few people attempt them until well into spring, unlike nz

I really like the concept of Te Araroa if you consider it in what I *think* is the original 1970s concept. ie. That it's primarily about connecting walkways so that it's actually possible to walk from points A to B in a practical way that's designed for walking. A to B might be Cape Reinga to Bluff, but it could as easily be two relatively close points along the route which couldn't be walked between previously in a practical way. Walking is virtually the lowest common denominator for getting around. There are a few exceptions of course, but nearly everyone can do it to some degree. Even so there have been recurring times when I've really wanted to be able to walk between two points, and it's been virtually impossible to do practically and safely. So many primary routes which used to exist have been usurped for motorised vehicle traffic, and by roads which typically assume there's nothing bad about taking a wide and looping detour to climb something gradually because all it requires is to put your foot down slightly more heavily. Te Araroa's concept says that even though we have roads for motor vehicles, we should also have footpaths where people can walk in obvious direct ways that don't necessarily, and sometimes shouldn't, have to cater to other forms of traffic. The original concept of Te Araroa has become a more convoluted, though. In roughly the last decade or so, when it's been getting closer to finished, its very existence has caused it to become associated with a global movement of people wanting to identify and walk long routes. It's reached out to a niche but global (and so big for NZ) community which didn't exist in the 1970s. Everyone in that community who wants to "see New Zealand" automatically ends up considering Te Araroa as a natural way to do so. So now, instead of simply having a policy of encouraging connectivity between walking routes, and the occasional nonconformist who decides to give the whole thing a go, we have an intense bubble of visitors going (usually) from north to south every summer. In some cases it's just because people want to tick an item off their global list, which might be fine except that list has attracted a lot of people to a route which is struggling to cope in some parts. We have people racing each other for the speed record. We have people religiously plotting distances and elevation profiles, and discussing where to stay and how to arrange food drops, and publicly writing about every moment of their journey in a way which invites other people to do the same. I like the connectivity, but the consequences of the attention through social media and other places make it quite a different sort of thing which I don't think many anticipated until fairly recently.

theres numerous options to choose from in the way of routes to take to travel the length of nz, but you have only one route promoted to everyone by the TA trust but thy don't administer a lot of the infrastructure themselves... they dont have to pay for it to cope with the numbers on the track... a few people do their own research and make their own trail. but the majority seem to be following most of the TA.

Gregor >The number of people is the root of most of the issues this thread is addressing. More people = more problems; simple, really. Totally agree. I don't accept perceptions over time (even/especially my own) as I know how (unconsciously) biased they can be. Whatever the relative % of which group causing what problems, they are more prevalent now because there are more people. It would be good to discuss solutions for the problems - and the *people* causing the problems, not the *foreigners* causing the problems.

An interesting conversation; lots of aspects to this. Ultimately it comes down to responsibility, if we want to enjoy the privilege of engaging with our wild places, we must also shoulder a duty of care to look after them, to minimise our impact and act as custodians for those who will come after us. That of course is an ideal of a much broader application than walking the TA; but surely it is closely aligned. And giving some concrete expression to some simple ideas; such as conveying the inherent value and fragility of the places the TA passes through, of the simple things each walker can do to leave it better than they found it, to give voice to an ethos of transformation, each day being incrementally built upwards on the one before. How each small amount of care, tidiness and responsibility accumulates, why everything we do matters. This last was one of the most enduring things I took away from the longer solo tramps I undertook, the longest being 23 days without seeing another person. During these days I found myself in a meditative state, highly mindful and intensely conscious that everything I did mattered. It's hard to describe accurately how this felt, but looking back I see it as a form of transformation, learning how to pay attention and properly see not only the world, but my connections within it. People doing long walks are seeking something, often they want change in their lives, to find the new or escape the old. I would suggest TA walkers are on the aggregate, psychologically open and receptive. If as a tramping community we want to see these problems solved I think it's well within our reach to find constructive paths forward.

its a numbers game, nz has 4 million people on a pretty small landmass, how many international tourists are there in the world? hundreds of millions? a billion? locals will pale into insignificance if the tourists are left to come in unthrottled.

@ wayno I'd imagine that at least part of the answer to the conundrum of the ever increasing demand for experiences like the TA, is that more walks like it will be built. On a pilgrim's scale, moving at the pace his/her feet can take them, the world is still a very large place.