Location: Whangarei Heads
Author: Teresa Davenport
Participants: Teresa, Sean, Kaleb, Rebecca
Date: January 2025
Day 1
We got to university at the leisurely time of 9am. We then set off to the start of the track. On our way highlights/lowlight for me were the nice bays, loads of weeds, sheepworld, bakery, I’ll leave you to guess what was high and what was low.
When we got to the start of the track we all stretched our legs and put on our packs. We were all excited, we had paid $35 for the hut so we were expecting greatness as usually I went to huts for free with my backcountry hut pass!
We started from the end of peach cove track, and walked up and up and up and up! Rebecca and I were looking at all the flora on the way using our favourite app if we didn’t know what a plant was AotearoaSpeciesIdentification. The has been a significant amount of trapping in the area that had been done too so there were loads of birds we could hear.
When we reached to the top we all were relieved as sweat beaded down our foreheads from the elevation. It was then we realised it was now time to go back down the hill to the other side down the hut. 814 stairs down, someone had written in sharpie on the doc sign. Yay!
We made our way down feeling a bit sorry for ourselves tomorrow. When we finally made it to the hut we’d only been walking for about an 1 ½ so we put our bags down, went into the hut and saw our stay for the next for and went to the beach.
The beach was all good, a bit stony, saw loads of shags and the sea was quite rough. I went for a swim then I came out and started reading. Reading often makes me sleepy so then I had a quick nap. I didn’t manage to get enough sleep the night before as we went out for my flatmates birthday, haha,
I woke up with the book still on me and I realised I had been tarnished by the sun but had gotten myself a book sunburn, lol.
After that we went and climbed the big rock that had a tree coming growing off it and just chilled. We saw kaka which blew our mind. We initially thought about going for a walk since the walk in was so short but decided against it since the 814 steps didn’t sound appetising… and we’d just leave that for ourselves for the next day.
We then sat down, played a few rounds of cards then enjoyed our dinner.
Milkception
In the car of the way to peach cove Kaleb had discussed some cursed combos. He talked about gonster (Guinness and Monster), Pilk (Pepsi and Milk), lastly carbonated milk, this being milk that had been soda streamed to be carbonated…. He stated that he’d always wanted to try milk, with milk powder in it. Milkception. I had brought milk powder for my tea and someone had kindly left a little uht container of milk in the hut. We didn’t feel too good about using it in case someone needed it but we justified it for science! We initially tried our regular UHT milk which was pretty shit we all thought. We then made our concoction… and guess what! It was delicious!!!! It made the milk more creamy and just generally sweeter and yummier. Would recommend if you can try it one day. Now to exit from Milkception, done de done doooooooooo. Alien music.
There was a beautiful pink sunset which we enjoyed
Now the reason I called it leach cove hut was that the hut was just shit. We ran out of water, the room was mouldy, it was very very hot in the night, mosquitoes everywhere, it should have really slept 6 because I had to sleep on half a mattress up the wall, the list goes on! Usually I’m happy with most hut and pretty chill but I was mostly mad because I had my hopes up since it was $35 and was disappointed… I also don’t get how it was serviced.. no burner to bring wood to, it wasn’t clean… it was in dyer need of love our huts from fmc.
The kiwi were loud in the night too, was probably the best feature of the hut… and it wasn’t even something the hut did…
Day 2
The next morning I actually had an okay sleep but some of the crew barely slept from the heat. We enjoyed breakfast and made our way out up the 814 stairs. I actually didn’t find it too bad although my glutes got a workout. We decided to take a detour back to the car since it was such a short walk. We went via ocean view track and the ocean views were beautiful to say the least. We stopped at a few cheeky viewing points where we embraced our inner climber to see some beautiful views across the Pacific Ocean.
We then made our way down sort of getting wasted by the wind. We saw some remenant of WW2 including a radar station.
After we had finished we made our way to Urquarts Bay to get some water… we had run out since the hut didn’t have any…
After that we made our way to our local bakery and headed home. Thanks everyone for coming on this trip, had a lot of fun!
Would not recommend this hut just do the track as a day walk!!
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