Today – 25.3km from Merrivale to Martin’s hut

Total – 2888.3km

The lovely Sandra from the campsite insisted on giving us a ride back to the trail, and she wouldn’t let us give her anymore than 10 bucks for the camping last night. Legend.

We saw Dan & Liv and Wieke at the trailhead. The first part of the day was climbing up 600m to the highest point left on the TA. This was on a 4WD track part of the way, and then changed to tramping track through a cool forest halfway.

We had a cheese break and continued, breaking out of the forest. Up here we were partly in the cloud, and could see an amazing sea of clouds all around.

We had lunch at the high point and enjoyed chilling for a really long time, chatting with Dan and Liv who were also up here.

Emeric had never seen a sea cloud, or an inversion before, so he was stoked, and took some sweet as pictures.

Crazy to see the view all the way to the coast. It’s really starting to be true that it’s coming to a end.

After lunch it was cruising down a road for an hour to an old quarry. Had a lot of laughs and another break on the way. Definately not in a hurry these days.

Climbed another few hundred metres to Longwood Trig point, again some awesome big views down the coast. Seeing bluff is so strange after walking ‘to Bluff’ for so many months.

Tussock and views aside, there was a bit of mud in the tracks today, definately nothing that crazy. A lot of people had complained about the mud but we both had dry feet at the end of the day. We do wear boots though.

Longwood forest was really cool, Dr Seuss vibes and really green and mossy.

Arrived at the hut just shy of 7pm, expecting to camp after taking our time all day, but only Dan and Liv were there, examining the water tank and deciding whether or not to stay.

They decided to push on , so we were stoked, a bunk in the last hut on the TA, Martin’s hut.

We got the fire going, enjoyed dinner and talked about the TA and how weird it was that we are nearly done.