Day 4 – Colac Bay to Port’s Water Race

In the morning I got a ride to the beginning of the Long Hilly Track with a fellow backpacker I met at Dustez.  This is the beginning of the Longwoods section of Te Araroa.  Kevin’s farm is right nearby, so I had arranged to meet up with him and get a few more bits of information about the route.  Kevin was busy moving some sheep though, so while I waited I did a short hike of Long Hilly, which is a loop through historic mining operations.

I came back down around ten-thirty, and Kevin gave me a few more GPS coordinates, as well as some more descriptions of key navigation points on the route.  I was getting antsy by this point to get on the trail, as I had quite a long day ahead if I meant to reach Martin’s Hut by dark.  But meeting up with Kevin proved to be quite useful and important.  He walked me back to the top of Long Hilly, describing the history of the area as we walked.

The area we were in at the moment is the site of an old Chinese gold mining operation, and the Port’s Water Race track which I was about to hike follows the course of a miles-long ditch dug to supply water from the opposite side of the mountain for this operation.  This is no ordinary ditch, naturally – in order to make the distance it had to be carefully built with an absolute minimum of fall per distance travelled.  And in order to carry enough water it was as much as 1.5 meters deep in places.  The route I was to follow was actually the old maintenance track used by workers for the mine to keep the water flowing.

The nature of the race meant that the route closely hugged the contour lines of the mountain, dipping inwards and then outwards again at each gully.  It also meant that the track was quiet flat the whole way, and relatively easy to follow despite being occasionally overgrown.  A few times I lost the track for a moment, but I found I only had to reason about where the race would have gone, and I found it again quickly.  The first time this went wrong, I backtracked to the last point I had seen the track and realized that some rotting timbers found there were the remains of a bridge that had once crossed the nearby dip.  Sure enough, straight across the gap I found the trail picked up again.  Over the course of the day I found several more such bridges, as well as some places where the race tunneled under a hill.  It was a fascinating route to follow.

The weather was wet and gloomy all day, with intermittent showers, which dampened my overall enthusiasm to finally be tramping in the woods after a lot of road and beach walking.  As the end of the day approached, I figured I was quite close to the hut, but darkness was closing in early because of the clouds so I reluctantly set up camp in the rain.  I was happy to have my Hennessy Hammock, because it would have been hard to find open, flat ground near the trail – most of the floor was quite uneven with fallen trees and stumps.  However finding two suitable trees to hang from was easy.

Once I got warm and dry inside my sleeping bag, all grumpiness at the conditions outside quickly faded away, and I resolved not to get out of bed until it had stopped raining and the skies were clear.