• Te Araroa Day 37
• Drury to Bombay – 14.37 km in 3 hours 20 minutes
• Bombay to Rangiriri – 30 minutes on Intercity Bus

Probably the best part of this day was breakfast with the friendly B&B people – not technically included but they’d kindly invited me over. Toast has so much texture after quite a lot of porridge on this journey. I could have stayed and chatted all day but had to get going. The bus was scheduled to arrive at the Z petrol station in Bombay at 1:55 pm, so I didn’t want to be too early and have to wait for an hour there, but didn’t want to run late and hurry either.

After all the rain yesterday it was a beautiful blue sky day, but a very uneventful section of roads. One of the roads was parallel to the motorway for quite some time, and predictably the Good Friday traffic was awful! The cars were crawling but I wasn’t quite going faster than them. I did feel relieved that getting the bus was probably the right decision.

After a couple of breaks, I did seem to have timed it well. The sun was now beating down and there was a steep hill to climb before dropping down into Bombay…

I was a bit shocked I could still see the sky tower looking back towards Auckland as I went down the hill into Bombay. You might need to zoom in but it’s there!

I got to the Z station at 1:30, and it was packed! I felt really glad I’d located a toilet open at the rugby fields not far back, because the Z toilet queue was looking very long. I chatted to another couple of people waiting for the bus, and watched the mayhem on the forecourt. There were not nearly enough parking spaces and it was so busy that drivers were just haphazardly stopping anywhere. I wondered if I’d brave this kind of traffic to holiday somewhere.

The bus was about 45 minutes late because of traffic, and had only 3 empty seats as far as I could see… In hindsight I was lucky to get a ticket! It was just a short half hour ride to Rangiriri, but equated to about 40 kilometers of Te Araroa trail.

Rangiriri consists of a handful of houses, a pub, and not too much else. I located Cathy’s house two doors down from the pub (oddly seemed to be open on good Good Friday) and she directed me to the grass out the back of her house. There’s a public toilet in front, with water at the back of it which is helpful for camping. You might have been worried that my tent had become a decorative accessory, and I was planning on sleeping in comfy beds forever… but it was back to reality tonight.

Cathy mentioned a jet boat race group coming to camp too, but that she was heading out to go to Hamilton for the night. I was vaguely thinking of going back to walk the 8km of road from this end (and back again) so that I would have skipped less of the trail in total. There were 3 problems though … Firstly my quads were really sore and not happy. Secondly, my tent was set up in an unfenced paddock on the corner of state highway one and backing onto the pub. It was pretty exposed and left me feeling it wasn’t a good idea to leave anything there for a couple of hours. Thirdly, Cathy implied she wanted to get going but was worried about not being there when the racers arrived. So I said it was fine, I’d stick around.

It was hot but I read in my tent and fell asleep for a bit. The other campers never showed up. I wished I’d stayed at the pub, where I could have left my stuff and possibly done some of the missing trail. The public toilet was annoyingly popular. When I finally got in, I found a frog and rescued it, which was really the only highlight of the second part of the day….