Tramping the whole of NZ

Hi Wevorsit, Good on you. I think people might like to know a bit about you, your previous experience, your preparations and planned route, if they are to consider joining you. Like, I would not consider joining a trip that would require mountaineering skills, crampons, ice axe etc because I do not have the appropriate experience. Also they are likely to need to know when you plan to do the trip. Good luck and take care

Doing a trip like this is absolutely awesome. My mate, Emma did the South Island totally unsupported by herself the summer before last. Some routes are easier than others. Down here in the South Island, if you stick east of the main divide, it is supposed to be easier than going on the west side. If you go through Southland, of course it will be easier than Fiordland. The Fiordland section is the hardest and even Emma baulked at a solo traverse from West Arm to the Milford track though a few guys have done it solo e.g. Michael Abbott and Steven A. Footslogger (deceased).

Hi Honora, Wondering how your friend managed food resupplies? I am hoping to do a long trip like this some time (arranging such a long time off work is difficult, so I'm not sure if or when it will be). Best I have come up with is recruiting friends and family members to drive out to meet us at certain points, keeping in touch via mountain radio re our expected arrival day. (They are keen to help but I don't think it would extend to camping out waiting for us if we are a day late!) I am not comfortable to hitch hike, eg to get to a town where we could have pre delivered supplies stored. Anyone else have any suggestions? (sorry I do not mean to hijack this forum)

Hi, awesome, hope you enjoy it! I have a suggestion for resupplies to make it easier for people who drop off food for you: They can package the supplies waterproof and mice-resistant and just deposit them in a place where you will find them when they give you the description, but where they won't be found accidentally by anyone. Walking into the trail from the trailhead for a quarter of an hour or so and then bushbashing away from the trail for a bit should be enough. They just need to make sure it's a place that is easily describable, e.g. "in the third left bend from the trailhead, off to the right into the bush, about 20 metres away from the trail". You may have to look around a bit, but you should find it. It depends on both your skill and the skill of the helper, of course; you need good communication skills to do that, but it is doable. That way, they don't have to wait to actually meet you in case you are late; if they meet you, great, if they don't, no problem, they just leave the supplies there. For the things you might have wanted them to take back home that you don't need anymore - rubbish etc. - it should be little enough that you can carry it on to the next resupplying stop; or if it is not, you could fill the resupply box with it after you have taken the fresh supplies out, and they can come back at a later date and collect it - or even you yourself after you have finished your trip. Cheers, Matt

Janet Macnab and I organised 6 months' of food for our traverse of the South Island. All told, I did 80 days of this so nearly 3 months of it. We enlisted anyone we could to place food drops e.g. DoC guys from the Glenorchy Field Centre, mates, strangers we'd just met, hunters, helicopter pilots, rafting companies and jet boat operators. Mind you, it was mostly Janet doing the organising and she just used to giggle! She was pretty cheeky but I don't know if that will work for you. Because you're young, people will probably be really keen to support you. Not sure about Chris1 but he looks pretty young... Janet must've done a lot of favours and was calling them in because she had loads of mates involved with meeting us and feeding us up. Some of them were through the tramping club we belonged to and some were her pals, rellies and workmates. We had one person who stored the food drops whose task it was to ensure they got dispatched to whoever was doing the drop. Janet was a whizz on spreadsheets - I'm talking fourteen years ago too. The boxes were numbered and there was a mastermap of the South Island with the location where they were to be dropped and other details on it held with our organiser. Pete Ozich and Kirsten Mackay had her parents in this role. One time, the evening meals were only starch with no flavours! We only had 1 occasion when the food drop wasn't available. Some desperate character(s) couldn't resist eating our entire food drop at Creswick Flat for the section between Fraser Hut in the Landsborough until our next food drop in Kennedy Hut in the Dobson. Fortunately we had lots of spare food as it was the hunting season and generous hunters gave us venison and had left food in other huts en route. If you ever do a trip like this, you'll always check out the spare food cupboard. I recall finding a kg of cheese in the first aid cupboard in Broderick Hut! In the hut before that, we purloined tomatoes and an apple cucumber from the rubbish pit. Most of the drops were left in huts but there was one left near the public shelter at Pleasant Flat. It was along the black polythene pipeline in a cardboard box wrapped in a packliner. We had a problem with these sealed containers as the white spirits vapourised into the fat of our food drops e.g. tahini and the taco chips, but we were so hungry, we didn't mind and after a while began to crave white spirits flavour. On a trip like this, you get very hungry and have an unbelievable appetite. I accidentally ate an entire cheesecake when I was meant to save half for Janet so she got the entire cheesecake at the next food drop. I'm the only person I know who's done a traverse like this and not lost weight. We had massive amounts of fattening food in our drops and consumed 500g each of starch with each evening meal. On the 10 day sections we carried 500 ml of olive oil and poured it into the evening meals. Janet lost 8kg because she couldn't eat as much as me and I got to eat what she couldn't! Nowadays I'd probably know more about using fiddlesticks and eating berries for fresh vitamins. I did recognize a bunch of golden fungus growing on a rata stump that a Maori bushman had told me was edible a few years before so we had a feed of them in mushroom soup after I'd given up picking out half the worms while they were cooking. Janet didn't mind when I told her after. She was good like that... The hut food drops were in cardboard boxes and the helicopter drops were in plastic drums. We left the plastic drums and the white spirit containers too with apologies written on them in the huts. I can live with this when I take bottles and rubbish like those tealight candles out of huts all the time. When Emma did her trip, she used a little gas burner stove and canisters. I think this would be fine. Of course the wood burning stove sounds brilliant too as there's always dry skerricks of wood in hut woodpiles. BTW, we raised $5,000 of sponsorship and it equated to earning about $8 an hour! We did meat raffles donated by butchers in pubs and lots of letter writing to businesses for food donations which we dehydrated into meals e.g. chili con carne, curried sausages, fish curries etc. etc. DoC sponsored our mountain radio. Unless you're doing it Emma-style it would be very good to have the radio, especially the one where you can phone people. Maybe your folks could hire you a sat. phone! Emma is very independent and only carried a PLB. She got rid of the mountain radio early on at the Waitutu Lodge. Unfortunately the cops hounded her whenever they could which she hated. She is very slight and looked about 14 years old at the time (she was 20 I think), so impressions are misleading but is very competent in the hills as was proved by her acheivements free from any form of epic as she was constantly exercising sound judgments with river crossings, campsite selection, navigation and knowing when to back off.

Often you can get away with having the food drop put under the bunks furtherest away from the door!

I'm finding it hard to find a constant track that doesn't lead back to any roads; which I don't want. Also, once I do find this track, how do I go about the camping situation when I won't be around any sites? set up whenever and whereever I don't think will be an option in most places.

Honora, I am a little worried, do I really look like a guy??? Perhaps I need to start wearing make up while out tramping, and get my ears pierced :-) Thanks for the helpful comments though. Sounds like you had a great adventure. I have some trouble asking people to sponsor me for something that I feel only benefits me - I even hated asking for sponsorship to walk 100kms in 36hrs in Oxfam Trailwalker, and that was fundraising for Oxfam! Wevorsit, setting up camp anywhere is fine as long as you are on public land and not within 500m of a great walk. If it is private land you should ask permission of the farmer. Just tidy up after yourself, take away all your rubbish, and be very very careful with any fires (preferably, use a gas or spirit cooker).

Oops, sorry Christina! Assumptions. No you don't look like a guy at all. Not when I check out the big pic...Good advice to Wevorsit, BTW. I would be shy asking for sponsorship too but Janet was very out there and it was encouraging. She was quite upfront that it was about sponsoring a couple of middle-class women on their holiday! Wevorsit, you'll have a big learning curve if you don't know about being able to camp anywhere except within 500m of a great walk. However, starting in the north is the easy end and you'll have learnt heaps by the time you need to know it e.g. I learnt to navigate on our traverse. It got progressively more difficult as we went north and we became sufficiently proficient to do the nav. With the camping, there are some areas that are fragile that DoC wouldn't be keen on people tramping at but I've not seen these signposted. When I did the Routeburn with another woman as part of my traverse, the ranger wasn't keen on our deviating from the track and camping more than 500m distant at areas he said were ecologically fragile (Conical Hill and head of L. MacKenzie) so he invited us to stay in the DoC quarters and cooked us dinner!