Two children are on track to become the youngest to walk the national trail running the length of New Zealand, having completed the entire North Island a few days before Christmas.
Jonathan, six, and Elizabeth, nine, have walked more than 1,600km (994 miles) since October when they set out with their parents, Chris and Jorinde Rapsey, from Cape Reinga at the tip of the North Island.
The children are being home-schooled on the Te Araroa trail, which ends 3,000km away from Cape Reinga at the small seaside township of Bluff, at the bottom of the South Island.
Jorinde Rapsey said her children’s daily energy and enthusiasm was impressive and both kids seemed “really happy” on the trail, with the greatest conflict so far which flavour muesli bar the family would eat each day. “At the start the children were tired and found some parts hard but now they are loving it,” Jorinde said. “It amazes me that at the end of a long day Jonathan still jumps around full of energy … overall they have just been really happy.”
The family was averaging 20km of walking each day, Jorinde said, though occasionally they had clocked 30km. At time of writing the Rapseys were on the Queen Charlotte section of the trail at the northern tip of the South Island, after taking the ferry from Wellington to Picton on 21 December. The Rapseys are aiming to reach Bluff in March 2019.
Jorinde said she and her husband rented out their Dunedin home to finance the trip, and they’d felt confident embarking on the adventure after two family hikes in Fiordland in the lower South Island earlier in 2018, as well as many more hiking trips as the kids have grown up.
Both children are home-schooled in Dunedin and have been able to keep up with their studies on the walk. “We’ve been doing a lot of maths problems for fun to work out how much of the track is left, how far we’ve come, and how much further we’ve got to go each day. It’s amazing the questions we get,” Jorinde said.
The Te Araroa trail spans 3,000km along the spine of New Zealand and opened in 2011 after more than 30 years of planning. It passes through wilderness areas and alpine environments as well as cities, towns and major transport routes.
The Te Araroa Trust chief executive, Mark Weatherall, said before the Rapley family, the youngest person to walk the trail had been an 11-year-old. “If these guys can do it then so many other Kiwis can do it too,” Weatherall said.
This summer more than 1,000 people are walking the entire length of the trail and hundreds of thousands of people walk sections of it each year.
