Up and Over

The Okura Walkway pt 2a

Okura Sandspit to Dacre Cottage (via bush track)
(page 1)

This was our New Years Day 2008 project, conceived the day before we knew we were going to get about three hours sleep on New Year's Eve - at our age, too... It was consequently somewhat more of a challenge than it might have been otherwise.

This is the route you will likely use 2 hrs either side of high water. The beach route is still manageable but it will involve wet feet and running tortuous gauntlets of pohutukawa branches. For some distance it follows the shoreline with occasional sidetracks onto shiny white shell beach, before climbing massively to the top of the cliffs and following their course before a sharp (111 steps) descent to sea level and Dacre Cottage.

Steps? Yes, of course.

Here's a sidetrack to the beach

Many of the trees along here - and earlier - have a pronounced lean.

Here's a shrubby kawakawa, thick along the edge of the path, along with hangehange. I have a moment's wonder about why so many Maori names for plants have a repeated element, rewarewa, kohekohe, and so on

For a while the track is only a metre or two from the beach.

There are large numbers of young nikau featuring along here.

A bit of up and downing, but nothing serious yet.

More shoreside track.

and a nice view out through a flax plant.

Here we go.

And up

and up and around

and just up

The inside of my left knee is playing up a little. I suspect it is the soleus muscle, the one underneath the big calf muscle, the gastrocnemius. If I overdo the hillwork without getting properly warmed up, the gastrocnemius goes on weekend leave and hands the job of walking uphill to the parallel muscle underneath, the soleus. Now the soleus is a slow twitch muscle, whose function is stabilisation rather than fierce action. It's the one that stops you falling over when you're window shopping.

In my case, it lodges a protest by aching like hell where it joins onto the shin bone just below the knee. It's not disabling, just sore, and the only remedy is to slow down and not use it to make hard push-offs. I change the way I use my sticks a little to take some of the push-off pressure away from it. It will plague me tonight whenever I try to straighten my leg in bed.

Moral. Get properly warmed up if you can, or choose a track with no hills for the first kilometre or so.

Here we are at the top at last. Across the fence is a substantial pine plantation.

We turn right towards the cliff.

I think this is a dianella, it's berries still green and with some way to go before thy emerge in their shining fluo-blue ripe form.

The pohutukawa is impressive from a distance, but close to the flowers are a little blowsy. Rex Fairburn described the flowers as "like blood sprinkled on the lintel of the land." Almost certainly Rex would have walked along this coast at some time. His poetry is still a regular companion: "the wave, that holds the summer in its green concave".

Between the plantation fence and the cliff edge, the track makes its way along an avenue of gorse and bracken.

An occasional pohutukawa frames a view in its twisted branches.

Shit. I've got to climb up those. As we approach the top of the staircase a middle-aged Asian lady appears over the top, vocally and dramatically gasping for breath.

I stop at the bottom and look back up.

It's blazing hot, a bit after 1pm, and we forego the final 200 metres to Dacre Cottage in favour of a shady spot beneath a beachside pohutukawa.

There are thousands and thousands of fluffy grass heads. We called them bunnies as kids. Many of the Asians we have met along the track today have handfuls of them to take home. In a vase at our place are bunnies which in some cases go back more than thirty years through a long history of beach trips.

I pull out the thermos, which today has ice cold orange juice in it, and we finish off some of last night's leftover food for lunch. I lean back in a heap of soft kikuyu grass and snooze. So does Alice. The sun moves around and gets a bit hotter. We head back. About 2 hours each way for me. Miranda decides to pretend she's fit and heads off at speed. She arrives at the van 20 minutes ahead of me and promptly falls asleep in the back.

For the second half of the track, click on NEXT.