Post-cyclone Moerangi

Cyclone Cook and Cyclone Debbie have done a bit of damage around the country.  We had some wild weather in Tauranga, and know that Edgecumbe was dreadfully flooded.  But we hadn't really appreciated the strength of the storm, the viciousness of a cyclone, until we headed to Whirinaki for a few days.

The Moerangi is one of my favourite trails.  At last count, it was 5 hours of honest riding, through glorious ancient forest, with an abundance of wildlife.  Today, Moerangi and Mother Nature whooped my ass.

Massive sinkholes in Okahu road added an extra hours (uphill boring) ride.

And small tributary streams into the main river were now in vast, fresh gorges, where huge flows of water and treefall debris obviously came gushing down when the storm was at its height.  It was hugely impressive, and nearly unbelievable to see.  A reminder that we humans are small and insignificant.  I love being reminded that I am small and insignificant, I think it's the part of going bush helps me to brush off the stress of a busy life.

At some slips, I had to haul my bike over huge treefall and down into the river bed, yanking on supplejack and trying to keep my footing on fresh new banks and falls.  At one gravelly slip I couldn't get traction to carry my bike up but Tom had given me a short rope so I could haul it up after me.  (mental note - work on knot tying...)  

Anyway, SEVEN AND A HALF hours after starting, I dragged my aching, weary, stinging nettled, bush lawyered, cutty grassed self into the car park where the family were waiting.  It was a fairly stressful day once I realised I was going to be even later than our conservative estimate after Tom had ridden a day earlier and checked out the track. 

Arohaki Lagoon with the girls

I love that my girls have developed into full on bush walkers.  They hardly even bother to pretend they don't like it any more.  We left the car park with my day pack carrying supplied for the walk of about 2-3 hours, but they wanted to try out their new tramping packs so we re-distributed the gear and they both added their puffer jackets to their loads to flesh out the packs a little.  It makes me chuckle to hear them make plans, that everyone needs some water and food in case they get lost, and a survival blanket.  Obviously they've watched Tom and I pack for adventures on the lounge floor regularly. 

The forest around Whirinaki is so lush, and so...... big.  Our girls were interested in some of the history of this area, where native logging was taking place until the 1970s, when protests took place and there was violence between the greenies and local forestry workers reliant on the milling for employment.  

 After crossing a big puddle, our track became much smaller and less distinct, crossing with other trails.  The girls quickly picked up that the track felt different, and we hadn't seen a marker for a while.  It was great to be able to show them in real life, how important it is to be able to track back to where you last saw a marker, what features you've seen to navigate from.  It turned out we had only gone a couple of hundred metres wrong from the puddle, where our trail turned and disappeared knee deep in the lagoon!  So much rain recently saw the lagoon expanding it's banks by about 50 metres.  Piggy backs required to sit on the seat islands of the viewing platform for lunch!