My Resupply Strategy on Te Araroa North Island

When it comes to planning your food and resupply strategy for a long distance trail or thru hike, there’s a fine balance between being over prepared and under prepared.

For those who have specific needs (especially dietary needs such as a free-from diet), sending resupply boxes containing specialist foods can be a lifesaver, especially on trails like Te Araroa which have limited access to these foods. My resupply strategy on Te Araroa was based on trying to stick to a gluten free diet during my thru hike for health reasons.

This post covers my full resupply strategy including some helpful tips on how to resupply for a long distance hike. It’s a long one, so use the Table of Contents below to navigate through this post.

prefer to watch?

Watch the full video on YouTube below.

This will not be a complete guide to resupplying on Te Araroa (mainly because I haven’t hiked all of it yet), so make sure you’re subscribed to this blog to get notified of future posts I upload about resupplying on a thru hike like Te Araroa.

I will be posting my full food and resupply strategy on Te Araroa once I’ve completed the South Island section in the 2020/21 season.

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First Things First – Every Person Is Unique

You need to understand me and my particular way of hiking and resupplying before we go any further into my resupply strategy on Te Araroa.

For starters…

I have specific dietary needs which mean that I have to eat a low gluten and low dairy diet as much as possible (let’s be honest though, my food on Te Araroa was probably 90% chocolate and cheese, so a lot of that went out the window early on!). I knew from the start I’d have to make and dehydrate my food supplies and send them to myself along the way rather than resupplying en route. This became a major part of my resupply strategy on Te Araroa.

Secondly

I chose to take a stove with me on my thru hike of Te Araroa’s North Island. Whereas there were a lot of other hikers on trail who did the same, I also came across plenty of hikers who had chosen to cold soak their way along the trail.

If you don’t know what cold soaking is, it’s a stoveless method of cooking food while thru hiking or long distance hiking. It avoids the need to have a resupply strategy on Te Araroa. And in my opinion it’s reserved only for the brave with iron stomachs and steely resolve!

Just kidding.

But cold soaking on a thru hike can save quite a bit of ‘unnecessary’ weight in carting a stove and fuel with you for 3,000 kilometres.

Thirdly

Even though I made and dehydrated my breakfasts and dinners, I wanted to get a good idea of what it felt like to resupply en route regardless, and so I decided to do my lunch resupplies as I went.

Lastly…

… and probably most importantly, at the time of writing I have only hiked the first 1,800km of Te Araroa. For the purposes of this post, that means pretty much just the North Island section. Even though I’m confident I have enough knowledge to write about it now, I won’t be covering anything to do with food and resupply on the South Island section of the trail in this post.

Once I have completed that section, I’ll write another post just like this one for the South Island.

Now that we have that out of the way…

A typical lunch on Te Araroa: slimy cheese and crumbly crackers.

What Kind of Resupply Strategy Do You Need?

So what kind of resupply strategy on Te Araroa do you need? It’s important to ask yourself this question early on. If you’re a seasoned thru hiker then you probably already have a good idea of how you are going to structure your resupply strategy on Te Araroa because you’ve tried and tested it before on other long distance hikes.

If you’re a beginner hiker and brand new to the game, you have some work to do!

What do you already eat at home?

Start thinking about how and what you eat at home in your normal life. It’s a good idea to replicate that in your resupply strategy on Te Araroa.

Think about what you usually like to eat, and what you prefer to stay away from.

A good general rule to follow is if you don’t usually want to eat a particular kind of food at home, you’re probably not going to want to eat it for 3-5 months on the trail.

Veggie Bolognese… one of my fav meals at home AND on the trail.  

I’m speaking from experience.

Before I started hiking I had to think about my food and resupply strategy on Te Araroa and what I wanted to eat for breakfast. This can be difficult at the best of times when you’re restricted to a gluten free diet. I read a lot of articles and watched a lot of videos, and noticed most thru hikers tend to eat some form of oats or porridge for breakfast on trail. I thought there must be a reason why so many people do this, so I bought a 5kg bag of gluten free oats and started splitting it up into breakfast portions with different kinds of dried fruit.

On my first morning on the trail I stared down into my pot at my mushy porridge, willing myself to eat it. For the next 79 days I had to force feed it to myself every other morning (I had two breakfast choices). I began to dread breakfast time.

I’m not really a porridge person at home, so I have no idea why I thought it might be a good idea on trail. If I had only thought about my resupply strategy on Te Araroa a little more carefully I might have avoided this.

Lesson learned.

One of the perks of hiking through a metropolitan section of trail – sausage rolls for lunch every day!  

Do you need to send yourself boxes?

Or can you make do with resupplying along the way? This will depend largely on what your diet is, and what kind of food you prefer to carry.

If you’re not a New Zealander, let me tell you something about resupplying along the trail: you’re going to find that there isn’t a lot of choice. Anywhere. Even in our larger towns, it can be difficult to find the kind of variety you might be used to where you come from.

So if there are specific things that you like to have in your resupplies, you might want to think about including them in your resupply strategy on Te Araroa and post them ahead to yourself.

Resupply boxes on Te Araroa – Mine usually always contained extra Snickers, tea bags and other items I didn’t want to buy in bulk.  

Nearly two decades of living in New Zealand has taught me that if you’re on a specific diet, you’re in even more trouble. You’re probably going to struggle to find diet-specific food on the trail.

Also, if you’re trying to stretch your funds as far as possible you need to be really careful with where you choose to resupply en route.

Why? Well, it all comes down to planning your resupply strategy on Te Araroa around the way the trail is routed and the facilities that are available.

It wasn’t obvious to me before I started my thru hike of the North Island, but Te Araroa has been specifically routed to bring foot traffic and business to the more remote regions of New Zealand.

Generally I think this is a great thing. As a New Zealander, I enjoyed being able to connect with kiwis in regions I probably would never have visited. I found a real sense of community lurking there that doesn’t exist in my ‘normal’ life.

But I soon noticed that it often cost a lot more money for that bag of grated cheese, block of chocolate or box of crackers to add to my supply.

Smaller resupply shops or dairies on Te Araroa like this one in Waitomo, will often be expensive.  

Whereas I enjoyed the opportunity to support the local communities, I understand how this might be a big deal for people who aren’t familiar with the commercial nature of New Zealand tourism (and yes, thru hiking Te Araroa is a form of tourism). I can also understand how it might cause some thru hikers to skip the North Island section in favour of the slightly less commercialised (and more remote) South.

This is well worth taking into account when planning your resupply strategy on Te Araroa.

 

A Tangent on NZ Food Stores

Food in New Zealand is expensive.

I don’t know why, it just is. Back in the day, the excuse used to be that we had to import a lot of our food from overseas, which meant added taxes and import fees. But in the modern day and age, I think this is a much less convincing argument.

But I digress.

There are three types of food stores you’ll find along the way on Te Araroa.

1. Your standard supermarkets. There are generally three main chains in New Zealand: Countdown, New World and Pak n Save.
2. Your smaller ‘superettes’. These are a hybrid between the supermarkets and the much smaller dairies. Specific towns may have their own independent superettes, but for the most part you’ll only come across one kind: Four Square.
3. Your convenience stores, more commonly known as dairies. These grew up out of a need for small-town New Zealanders to have access to basic items like milk, eggs, dairy products, perishables and newspapers outside of their weekly (or monthly) supermarket trips.

Sorting from most to least expensive: Dairies, Superettes and Four Square, Countdown, New World, Pak n Save.

But here’s the thing a lot of Te Araroa blogs don’t mention: Often there will be price differences between the same supermarkets just because of their location.

For example, you might purchase a packet of rice sides at Countdown in Hamilton for $2.50, but the same item in Countdown Paihia might cost you $2.75 or, god forbid, $3.00.

Why? Because Paihia is a tourist town. And in tourist towns, you’ll pay a premium.

Make of that what you will, but there’s not much that can be done about it. It’s just how New Zealand is. And (for our sins) we as New Zealanders just accept it as one of the costs of living in such a beautiful country.

So if you’re adamant you want to resupply as you go, but you’re also budget-conscious, play your resupply strategy on Te Araroa to avoid dairies and supermarkets in tourist centres as much as possible. This will help you to stretch your budget just that little bit further.

Tourist Towns Along Te Araroa include:

• • Kerikeri
  • Paihia
  • Waitomo
  • National Park Village

Planning Your Food and Resupply

What is it the Boy Scouts say… Be Prepared.

It’s no different when it comes to planning your resupply strategy on Te Araroa. I knew I’d be sending myself resupply boxes along the way so I started preparing early by poring over the Te Araroa Trust’s trail notes and trail maps to figure out where I would resupply.

Let me tell you, that’s no easy task.

Although I was very glad to have them, the Trail Notes are confusing and muddled at best. It can be really difficult to pull out the key information you need.

In hindsight, I wish I’d shelled out the NZD$49.99 for the Guthook guide to Te Araroa much earlier on in my Te Araroa journey. As it was, I didn’t end up purchasing Guthook until I reached Te Kuiti, almost 1,000km in!

Guthook is not the be-all and end-all of trail resources, but it’s certainly the one that I found the most helpful. I could easily pick out places to resupply and accommodation options, as well as look at the upcoming section of trail and find out where water and hazards might be.

I’ll be writing a post all about the phone apps I used on the trail at a later date, so keep an eye out for that.

By going through the trail maps you’re trying to figure out:

1. Which towns you need to resupply in; and
2. How long it’s going to take you to get there.

This will depend on your hiking speed and how far you can comfortably hike in a day. I aimed to target 4 – 6 days between resupply points. This was so I was always carrying the minimum food possible, without having to send lots of resupply boxes.

If your resupply strategy on Te Araroa is to resupply along the trail as you go, there will generally be somewhere to resupply every day, or every 2-3 days.

Check out the full list of locations I resupplied at on Te Araroa North here.

 

Preparing Your Food

Once you know where you’re going to send your boxes to you’ll have a better idea of the quantities of food you’ll need along the way. As part of planning your resupply strategy on Te Araroa you’re also setting a rough itinerary of how long it’s going to take you to reach each section (and ultimately the end of your thru hike).

But before you start preparing mountains of food, make sure you’re happy with what you’re going to be eating!

Test before you go

I’d highly recommend scheduling a 3-4 day ‘shakedown hike’ a few months before you’re due to start. This hike is designed to help you identify gear you’re missing (or, in reality, gear you really don’t need) and also what you’re happy to eat day in day out for 3 – 5 months.

If you can’t do this, there’s no reason why you can’t test your trail diet at home over a few days.

Chocolate milk: loved by me both on and off trail for decades.  

I read a lot of articles and watched a lot of videos before I hit the trail which suggested that if I planned all of my food every single day before I left, my appetite would change within the first week or two. They warned that I wouldn’t want to eat what I’d painstakingly planned out for the next weeks and months.

As I said before, this really only happened with my porridge breakfast option.

Because I’d committed to making and dehydrating my own meals, I was able to choose things that I actually enjoyed eating (things like Mexican Beef and Rice or Veggie Bolognese), and which I could also cram full of veggies.

As a result, there were very few times where I actually didn’t look forward to my dinner menu. This was even after I’d effectively removed one of my three options because (turns out) homemade dehydrated risotto doesn’t keep that well after a few weeks of sitting in a box!

 

Reduce your on-trail stress levels

Because I’d pre-planned my resupply strategy on Te Araroa and sent the bulk of my food ahead, I was a lot less stressed when I reached a town.

I’d watch other hikers frantically rushing to the store in the short amount of time they had in a town, and feel glad that the most I had to do was unpack my box and re-pack everything into my food bag.

Out of the box and into the bag: repacking my food resupply at Auckland’s post office.  

I could focus on the more important things, like buying three blocks of Whittaker’s chocolate and two bags of grated cheese for each section!

I’ll post the recipes for all of my meals on trail later, but in general my options were:

Breakfast

1. Porridge with either dehydrated apples or berries
2. ‘Breakfast Scramble’ made of dehydrated potatoes, dehydrated scrambled egg and topped with cheese

Dinner

1. Mexican Beef & Rice (from Backpacking Chef) topped with cheese
2. Vegetarian Bolognese (made with lentils and lots of veggies) topped with cheese
3. Mushroom Risotto topped with cheese

If there was a shop in a town where I’d stopped, I’d usually throw in some fresh vegetables or fruit like spinach, strawberries or broccoli.

Packing greens into my trail dinners, courtesy of a green juice mix and fresh broccoli from the Huntly supermarket.  

Start prepping sooner rather than later

If you’re going to be dehydrating or just repackaging pre-bought food before you set out on your hike, make sure you start well in advance.

There’s a fine line between preparing too early (and your food starting to deteriorate inside your boxes) and leaving it too late (so you’re literally still dehydrating at midnight the night before you start (like I almost was).

I was very conscious of the spoil factor. So I decided to use commercially dehydrated meat and egg products (which, as we all know, should last a lifetime) or make recipes where the individual ingredients were not likely to spoil (lentils will last a long time in whatever format).

Foods with high oil contents will spoil faster. This was the downfall of my mushroom risotto. I don’t think it actually started to go bad, but after about 6 weeks I noticed that my stomach reacted more than usual to it. So I cut my losses and removed it from the menu entirely.

Packing Your Boxes

Once you’ve assembled all of your meals, the next step in planning your resupply strategy on Te Araroa is to start packing them into their boxes.

If you’re a spreadsheet geek like me, you might have already figured out exactly how many days you’ll need between each resupply stop. This will help you assemble your boxes.

It’s not as simple as throwing everything into a box, though. There are some simple rules to remember when packing your resupply boxes.

 

Calculate how much you’ll need and don’t overpack!

Unless you have a really strict diet, the reality is that when you get to a resupply stop you’re probably going to eat out for dinner. You’re probably also going to pick up something for breakfast the next day.

That means you can have one less dinner in your previous resupply box, and one less breakfast in your next one.

You’ll find it difficult to resist buffet breakfasts in remote locations, like this one at Punga Cove resort on the Queen Charlotte Track.  

If you calculate a 4 day stretch between resupply points, and you pack 4 breakfasts and 4 dinners, it won’t be long before you’re carrying three or four days of surplus food.

This is what I did, and I had to pay extra postage to send surplus food home.

What about emergency rations?

But don’t forget there may be some sections where you’ll need to carry emergency food.

Like a noob, I carried emergency rations with me for over 1,000km of the North Island. I eventually realised that this wasn’t necessary until I reached a remote section (like the Whanganui River or Tararua Ranges) where I could easily get caught out in bad weather.

There’s another fine line for you: carrying emergency supplies vs. not carrying emergency supplies. That’s a topic for a later date too.

Think about difficult-to-procure items

These are things that you’re going to need regularly, but either you might not be able to pick up or might be too expensive/difficult to pick up easily. For example, toothpaste and soap (if you carry it), or even things like toilet paper.

On the North Island, you’re unlikely to be using a lot of your own toilet paper, as many of the places you’ll stop along the way will have it. But it’s difficult to buy single rolls of toilet paper in New Zealand, so anticipate where you might need them and send yourself one or two.

Burgers: A must-have otherwise-difficult-to-procure item on trail.  

I also packed things like single-serve peanut butter sachets (which I couldn’t always find in the smaller supermarkets or dairies) and plenty of Snickers bars (because that’s an emergency supply you don’t want to run out of!).

And I packed extra things like electrolyte sachets (I had one of these every night after making camp) and medications like ibuprofen and paracetamol.

If you enjoy drinking tea or coffee, but don’t want to carry multiple packets at once, you could always include these. I made the mistake of carrying a full packet of green juice mix with me almost all the way, when I probably could have split it up into smaller sachets.

Check out the video on my YouTube channel that goes along with this post to see exactly how I packed my resupply boxes.

Sending Your Boxes

On some of the other long distance trails in the world, there are only certain times of the day or week when you are able to collect resupply packages from the places that are holding them.

Unless you’re using the post restante service you’re not going to have this problem on Te Araroa.

When planning your resupply strategy on Te Araroa, look out for these four types of places to send your boxes to:

1. Motels
2. Backpackers
3. Campgrounds or Holiday Parks
4. Trail Angels

Regardless of where you’re sending, it’s important to follow my four Resupply Box Etiquette principles.

My 4 Resupply Box Etiquette Principles

1. Call or email ahead to check it’s ok to send a box to the place you’re intending to send it.
2. Check to see if there are any conditions of sending the box to that place (i.e. charges, pickups at certain times, length of time they’ll hold the box, addressing requirements).
3. Address the box correctly by including your name, the fact that you’re a TA hiker, your estimated arrival date and your phone number.
4. If there is no charge to hold the box, try to at least stay one night at that place or offer a koha (donation) for the convenience.

If you are sending resupply boxes to yourself, you must take responsibility for them.

What do I mean by this? Here’s an example.

When I started on the Timber Trail section, I knew I wanted to pick up a resupply box in Taumarunui 5-6 days later. I looked through the trail notes and the only place I found to accept resupply boxes was at the local Holiday Park. I  noticed it was off-trail, but didn’t think to look how far. I was in a rush so I asked Dad to deliver the box to the Holiday Park for me.

When I got off the Timber Trail (there is no cellphone service on it), I discovered that the Holiday Park was 4.5km off-trail! Dad told me that the lady at the Holiday Park was very abrupt with him and emphasised that I must pickup my box as she would not post it ahead for me.

On what should have been my ‘neero’ day I had to walk the 10km round trip to the Holiday Park to collect my box.

When I arrived at the Holiday Park, the proprietor was very appreciative. She told me that a lot of hikers (once they realised how far off trail they were) would carry on ahead to the next town and then ask her to ‘bounce’ their boxes ahead. She would then have to go to the time (and expense!) of posting the boxes for these hikers as well as running her business.

She said she didn’t mind holding boxes, as long as people came to collect them. 

I totally understand this. It made me upset that hikers would do this.

Eventually I realised it’s the difference between the facilities which are available to hikers in other countries (like the USA) and those which are available here.

‘Bouncing’ a box in NZ isn’t a simple (or free) task.

So, take responsibility for your boxes! Unless your host offers another solution, if you don’t need a box anymore either arrange to collect it at a later date, or ask that its contents be donated or destroyed.

Other General Resupply Tips

Fuel

If you are hiking with a stove, in your resupply strategy on Te Araroa you’ll have to think about how you replenish your fuel. 

Generally you won’t find replacement gas canisters at smaller towns. Often you’ll only be able to pick these up at outdoor retailers in larger cities (e.g. Bivouac, Macpac, Kathmandu or Hunting & Fishing) or at The Warehouse, a large chain store which stocks a small range of camping gear.

Enjoying a decent cup of tea (WITH MILK!) at the end of the Queen Charlotte Track.  

On the North Island I hiked all the way to Auckland (600km) on one canister by only boiling two pots of water per day, and using electric kettles and stoves at places I stayed along the way.

Shopping Bags

Another good idea is to carry with you a small reusable shopping bag to pack your groceries in when you’re in town.

New Zealand officially went plastic bag free on 1 July 2019, which means you won’t be able to pack your newly purchased groceries into a nice toxic bag whilst you carry it back to camp.

But at Countdown, for example, you can pick up a reusable nylon shopping bag for about NZD$2, which weighs basically nothing.

Keeping Your Gear Safe

Te Araroa is not quite established enough yet to see rows of packs sitting outside grocery stores while hordes of hikers roam the aisles inside. I definitely wouldn’t recommend leaving your gear unattended if you can help it.

Packs outside a bakery – a standard sight on Te Araroa.  

Despite the impression given by our tourism board, New Zealand is far from crime-free. Just last season alone I heard of at least one hiker whose entire pack and its contents were stolen whilst they shopped in store, and my hiking buddy Julia had her very expensive La Sportiva boots stolen from outside her motel room in Taumarunui.

If you’re hiking as part of a group, see if someone can wait outside with your pack whilst you’re inside. Otherwise, ask to leave it behind a secure counter or desk (somewhere the general public can’t access) before you start shopping.

 

Although not intended to be a complete guide to a resupply strategy on Te Araroa, I’ve shared my experience in the hopes it will help you adapt and experiment to find what works for you. If you have a question about my Te Araroa resupply strategy or would like any further advice, please get in touch!

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