Work at Rāpaki, a Funeral, and a North Island Roadie

I’ve been back at work at Rāpaki for well over a month now, and it’s been really nice overall. I still come home exhausted many days, but am ready to go again in the morning after a good night’s rest. We start planting soon, but up until now work has been really varied: we do trap servicing and trap maintenance, put out monitoring tunnels, cut back grass from around trees planted the last couple of years, do weeding down at the marae, or go cut grass and other plants where we’re needed. I hadn’t done any trapping before, so that was a bit of an upskilling moment – there are several different kinds of traps that are designed to kill possums, stoats, ferrets, weasels, rats, and mice. Every couple weeks we go check the traps and clean out any dead animals (a delicious task as you can imagine, especially if the animal has been dead long enough to become a maggot-fest), and then rebait the traps with a variety of lures including peanut butter and ground up dried rabbit. Trap maintenance means giving the traps a deep clean and scraping out all bits of dead animal and other gunk, and making sure either end of the trap is clear.

The traps are all marked on an app called Trap.NZ, and marked with colored tape as well. Sometimes they are simple and easy to find, but sometimes they are not actually located where marked, or the track is overgrown and the tape has blown away. It’s second nature for all the people who have been working here for several years, but I have spent up to an hour looking for a trap that turned out to be very findable – if you knew where to look. Overall, I love my job – it’s a good day when I get dropped off at a beautiful location to go do a trap line by myself and the sun is just peaking out from behind the clouds and the birds are singing. Some days, however, it’s hard unpleasant work – getting gorse down my underwear on a Monday morning while crawling around looking for a monitoring tunnel is not necessarily the way I want to start every week.

The monitoring tunnels are good fun – it’s a card about 30cm long with an inkpad in the middle half which bait (peanut butter or dried rabbit) is placed on. They’re then left out for a day or two, and then you can see who exactly has come through – mice, rats, wētā, stoats, and even skinks! I quickly got good at recognizing which tracks are what and spotting even the small skink tracks.

We also did a couple weeks of gorse control up Mt. Herbert / Te Ahu Pātiki, which is the tallest mountain on the Banks Peninsula at 919 meters above sea level. There are some alpine plants up there that occur nowhere else on the peninsula but are being crowded out by gorse, a disgustingly spiky plant brought here by the British (seriously, the whole plant is just spikes – leaves, stems, and all). To do the work up there we were driven up in what was basically an over-equipped golf cart, which was often pretty terrifying because the terrain was steep and muddy, and rolling was a very real possibility. To cut back the gorse we used loppers (long-handled garden scissors), secateurs (short-handled garden scissors), and handsaws. Once the gorse is cut you have to put CutnPaste on it, which is an herbicide (mostly glyphosate) that prevents the gorse from resprouting from the cut stumps. Because the transport took a good part of the day, we did 10 hour days, which meant we had to work only 4 days in a week.

During the first week we went up, it was foggy all day at the summit, and it felt like a weird unchanging liminal space. Sometimes the fog was so thick you couldn’t see 10 meters away from you. During the last week (after my holidays, more in a minute) we were rewarded with stunning views of the harbour and surrounding areas, and it was much warmer.

During Travis’s midsemester break we I took two weeks off so we could go do some traveling and tramping up on the North Island. We had started planning this even before I started working at Rāpaki, and it wasn’t a problem to take the unpaid leave. Our plan was to leave on Saturday, take the ferry up on Sunday, spend two weeks following the good weather for tramping, and then take the ferry back on Sunday 2 weeks later. However, this had to change somewhat.

On Wednesday evening Travis got a call from his parents saying his younger brother Joel had passed away unexpectedly. To protect the privacy of the family, I won’t give any more details here. As you can imagine, this was devastating for Travis and the whole family. After not sleeping much that night we left the next morning and drove up to Blenheim, where we stayed for a week. I did my best to support Travis and the rest of the family as I could, whether by preparing food, going on walks, listening when they talked, and holding Travis when there was nothing left to say.

Death is interesting, because it shows how big your support network actually is in a way that is rarely evident in everyday life. So many people came by to give their condolences to Travis’s parents in the first couple days, each of them bringing with them a precooked meal or flowers or homemade cookies. The abundance of food suddenly appearing was a blessing initially, because it meant very little cooking had to be done. It quickly became overwhelming, however, as the fridge and freezer overflowed and the baked goods piled up on the counter.

When someone dies unexpectedly (or even if it is expected), there are suddenly a lot of things that need to be done very quickly. The body must be prepared for burial, a coffin must be chosen, the funeral must be planned, a plot at the cemetery must be bought, possessions must be sorted through, bank accounts must be closed… all the things that make a life must be sorted out by people whose life it isn’t and who are grieving the life that has been lost.

I watched grief come in waves – there were times that weren’t too bad, like when the family was all together at meals or on a walk. But then at night in bed the thoughts and the tears would come, or when someone came to give their condolences, or when arriving at a place that held many memories.

The funeral was on the next Tuesday, and it was the first in-person funeral I ever remember going to (I attended Opapa’s funeral on zoom in 2023). Well over 200 people were in attendance, and most of the immediate family spoke and shared some memories of Joel. All in all it was a beautiful service, but heart-breaking. Losing a brother and a child long before it is their time to go is not something anyone ever wants to go through.

On the Thursday, Travis and I took the ferry across to Wellington – it was a beautiful morning and we saw some dolphins on the way across. Once in Wellington we went to the Te Papa Museum for an hour or so, and then spent the rest of the day driving north. We arrived after dark at a campsite just north of Napier and set up camp. The next morning we drove to Lake Waikaremoana, and caught the water taxi across the lake. There is one old Māori guy who runs the “WaiWai Express” and has a complete monopoly on water taxi rides across the lake. We paid $75 each for a 30 minute ride, and he can take up to 10 people on each trip, so he must be making good money. On the way over there were 4 guys from Auckland who asked us if we were doing the walk in the usual 3-4 nights. We had planned to do it in one night and said so; their eyes popped out of their heads just a little bit, and we wondered if we may have been too ambitious.

At 10 we were dropped off and started walking, and by noon we had reached the first hut. We reached the campsite at the halfway point around 5:30 that evening, just in time to go for a sunset swim and jump into bed early. The next morning we were not the most efficient and got going just before 9. We then stopped at the next hut for a swim since it was already quite warm. Most of the walking up until this point had been flat, but before lunch we climbed a sizeable hill to reach the last hut on the track, where we had lunch before descending back down the hill and reaching the carpark around sunset.

A couple notes about this area: Lake Waikaremoana is located in Te Urewera National Park, which received environmental personhood in 2014. Since then it has been under the care of the Tūhoe iwi instead of the Department of Conservation. They have taken some very controversial actions, including removing many of the huts, but ultimately they speak on behalf of the environmental person and it is their land to manage as they see fit. A friend of ours did the Waikaremoana Great Walk a couple years ago and complained to us about the state of the track and the huts, and so we were pleasantly surprised to find an incredibly well-maintained track and beautiful, spacious huts – Tūhoe must be doing something right!

We stayed another night at the campground we’d been at before, and drove to Taupō the next day. We spent a nice day there and went to the Aratiatia Rapids, Craters of the Moon, and free “hotpools” (lukewarm stream more like). Many of the places I had been to when I went to Taupō with Fiona 2 years ago, but I liked it and was not opposed to going again. That evening we had booked a table at an Indian restaurant through an app called First Table – the arrangement is that for a booking fee of $12 you agree to be the first guaranteed customer of the night (usually around 5:00pm), and in exchange your meal is 50% off. We ate some very yummy food that night for a very reasonable price.

We had decided that we wanted to do the Tongariro Northern Circuit as an overnighter the next day, not realising that it was also a great walk. When we checked huts for bookings, we realized they cost $66 a night to stay in… and also were fully booked out. Ah well, that’s what a tent is for, right?

The Tongariro Crossing is probably the most popular day hike in New Zealand. It is 20km long and takes you through some very rugged and exposed landscapes, including the active volcanic zone of Mt. Tongariro and Mt. Ngauruhoe (last eruption in 2012). Most people start around 7am, and there can be over 100 people on a good day. Many people who probably shouldn’t do the crossing attempt it, and in summer there are an average of 2 helicopter rescues per week for people who were unprepared for the conditions and don’t do much hiking.

Travis and I started from Whakapapa Village at 10, reached the first hut around 12:30, had a chill lunch, and started the main part of the crossing around 1:30. We reached the Emerald Lakes around sunset, and then started off toward the next hut. We found a sheltered spot next to a stream and behind a lava flow and set up camp. After a quick dinner we jumped into bed, with our fingers crossed that this wasn’t the night the mountain decided to erupt.

We packed up the tent just after sunrise and walked to the next hut to use the toilet. We also looked up the camping restrictions, and realized that the guidelines were twofold for camping on the great walk: 500 meters off the track, and outside the active volcanic zone. Oops to both of those… at the next hut, we told the warden that we had stayed at the previous hut and had started at 3am (the day before we had said that we were staying at the 2nd hut). Later, at the 3rd hut, we told them we had stayed at the 2nd.

The second day was long – about 27km – but easy walking. We made it to the car by sunset, and I was pretty exhausted. That night we stayed with a friend of ours who had moved to Ohakune, a small town right next to the national park. It was so nice to have a shower and sleep in a bed – traveling and tramping really highlights the luxuries of modern life.

The next day, we did a couple shorter hikes near our friend’s house. We had seen Mount Ruapehu from the other side for 2 days, and so it was cool to see this side – it had some snow on it so obviously was much colder. In town it was incredibly windy, but we managed to find ourselves in the perfect wind shadow of the mountain during our hikes, and it was a really nice day out.

Now it was time to start making our way back to Wellington. A storm was blowing in as well, so we drove in the rain. Along the way we stopped at the Waiouru War Museum, which Travis really wanted to go to – I did not want to go but agreed as long as we stopped at another museum of my choosing later that day. While reading about the museum online I saw that they had an archive, and so while Travis went through the exhibits, I went to the archive, which turned out to have lots of books on war, including one called “Love, Sex, and War”, which I spent the better part of an hour reading. It was very interesting and talked about the impacts war has on human sexuality, which was actually fascinating. I often struggle with museums that glorify war and talk about the bravery and heroic acts of battles and such – I know the suffering of innocent people lies behind it all, and yet it is portrayed as a good thing wrapped in the cloak of toxic masculinity. Learning about war becomes bearable to me when you talk about the real impacts it has on people, stripped of any glorification.

The museum I chose was a science museum that had lots of hands-on exhibits, as well as an aquarium full of native fish. A large part of the exhibit was dedicated to the Manawatū River, which is one of the few rivers that starts life on one side of a mountain range and flows into the sea on the other, crossing it on the way.

That evening we camped in the Tararuas before heading to Wellington in the morning. It rained all night and most of the next day. In Wellington, we went to the Wellington Museum and the Botanic Gardens in the afternoon, before going to stay at the house of one of Travis’s old flatmate’s parents (which was a very nice house with a stunning view of the Cook Straight and the South Island in the distance).

On our last day, we spent all day at Zealandia, which is the predator proof sanctuary right next to the city. It was a lovely day, and we saw many native birds that you don’t usually get to see, including saddlebacks, whiteheads, and kākā.

On Easter Sunday we took the ferry back to Picton – it rained part of the way and was quite windy. On the way back to Blenheim we stopped by the cemetery for a bit before spending the afternoon with Travis’s family, having an early dinner, and then driving back to Christchurch (it was still raining).

I thankfully had the Easter Monday off before heading back to work on Tuesday, which gave me a chance to put my life back together after our hurried departure 2.5 weeks prior. I didn’t celebrate Easter at all this year – usually it is a celebration of spring, with flowers, eggs, and baby rabbits. It’s autumn here, and the sun is setting early, the leaves are changing color, and it’s cold. I still don’t know quite how to feel about all the inverted holidays – so many of them are seasonal for me, but I don’t really feel like celebrating them in the wrong season. The result is that there are no holidays to celebrate the seasons, but I wish there were. Maybe I should make some up.

I’ll leave it here for now, but will be back with an update about visas and plans for the back half of this year and the first part of next year in the next post.