Kia Ora! (Welcome!) We made it to Auckland early this morning! We flew Air NZ from San Francisco- the airline is wonderful! We're spending some time in central AKL this morning before we go to our hotel to get some sleep. It's beautiful and warm here, AKL seems like a fun city. We're walked around Albert park for a bit which had some very interesting trees and tons of birds.

First stop this morning was the waterfront

 NZ coins

 Albert Park with a view of the famous Sky Tower

  We're in Auckland until monday morning when we'll take a bus north to Kaitaia and plan to start hiking from Cape Reinga on Tuesday.
Thanks for reading,
Happy trails!
Jetpack

Welcome

Greetings, and welcome to our Te Araroa thru hiking blog. In a few short hours, Brazil Nut and I will begin our journey to Auckland, and from there we will journey north to Cape Reinga, the start of our New Zealand thru hike.  Te Araroa (I will soon start referring to the trail as TA) is a 3,000 km (1,900 mi) long distance hiking trail, that starts at the north tip of New Zealand's North Island and ends at the southern tip of the South Island. For more information about the trail, I encourage our to visit their website: http://www.teararoa.org.nz/.

 Below, I have posted a map of the trail.

For anyone who is interested, we have provided links at the top of this page to some of our previous hikes.  In 2011 I thru hiked the Appalachian Trail (AT) with my friend 'Eats' and in 2012 Brazil But and I hiked the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) from Mexico to Canada.  The links provide access to our blogs from those trails, and we have also posted a gear list of our current NZ gear.
  For the next few hours I will be finalizing gear, maps, notes etc and tomorrow (Thurs) morning our journey will begin.
 Thanks for reading, I'm happy to be blogging as Jetpack again!
Happy Trails!
-Jetpack