Northern Walkway

Myself and my better half decided to celebrate our national holiday by tackling the Northern Walkway here in Wellington.

And wow what a walk. We got the train out to Johnsonville (thankfully it was the first day it was running after a month and a bit of upgrading), and began the 16km trek. I imagined that climbing Mt Kaukau at the start would be the most difficult part of the walk. However, it was relatively simple and by the time we got to the top we were able to soak up the 360 degree vistas of Wellington. The scenery is truly breathtaking, we not only got to see Wellington in all its glory from the highest point, we also got views of the South Island. (Unless you are a master walker I would suggest going the way we did, its basically a climb straight up from Khandallah if you go from that side.)

We naively thought that this would be the hardest part of the walk. We were wrong. We descended straight down Mt Kaukau into Khandallah and down into the Nagio Gorge. This lead onto what was most definately the hardest part, clmbing from the bottom of the Nagio Gorge up to the top of Wadestown and the Tinakori hill. It's fair to say that by the time we got to the top we were fairly spent. Having said that there are some beautiful houses in Wadestown. Dreams are for free, the houses certainly are not.

Once we got to the Tionakori hill we had a closer view of the city of Wellington, and the near full stadium, complete with a crowd sung rendition of Wonderwall (England must have been playing). From there it was straight down into Thorndon and back home. All in all a beautiful walk and if you have a spare half day I definitely recommend it. The town belt walks around the city is one of the reasons I love Wellington so much. The fact that you don't even have to walk 45 mins and be right in amongst nature makes living here truly worthwhile.

Hopefully the memories of the views will far outweigh the sore legs we had the next day.