Best-selling author Naomi Arnold on how thru-hiking Te Araroa broke her, changed her, and filled her with joy.
In the second of our series ‘People of Te Araroa’, we meet award-winning, Nelson-based author, journalist, and TA thru-hiker Naomi Arnold. Among many achievements in her 20-year career are stories in Washington Post, The Guardian, Lonely Planet, New Zealand Geographic, and BBC Travel. In 2024 she had the intense experience of not only solo hiking Te Araroa over eight and a half months, but also learning how to simultaneously walk, type and pour out her soul. The result was one of Aotearoa-New Zealand’s best-selling and most critically praised non-fiction books of 2025, Northbound: Four seasons of solitude on Te Araroa. We started off by asking Naomi:
What’s special about Te Araroa? What do prospective Te Araroa hikers need to bear in mind about Te Araroa that’s different from what they might have experienced on, say, the Pacific Crest or Appalachian trails?
Naomi Arnold (NA): One of the first things I heard an international hiker say on trail was, ‘This trail has humbled me’. And you have to let it humble you. Because the pathways overseas are well-groomed and long-established, and you come here and it’s brand-new.
The people who walk TA today are doing the work done by the people who created the trails in their countries a hundred years ago.
If you think of the billions of footsteps in Europe, on those trails, and in America – we’re only in the hundreds of thousands, or whatever, on our trail. And each of those footsteps creates the trail.
“It’s just beautiful you know…”. Dawn in the Tararua.
That’s what’s so cool, that’s why I f*cking love walking trails, excuse me for swearing… but like, I’m not interested in conquering new peaks, I want to walk a trail! Because you’re part of something. Like I kept saying in the book, you’re on this tread, on these train tracks, you’re following it. It’s just beautiful, you know.
The community is built into that soil, and they are actually creating it as they walk.
And you don’t notice it overseas, in their countries of millions of people, because it’s all been done for them. But here, they’re actually pioneers – they are building the trail.
Te Araroa (TA): Registering to walk Te Araroa is not cheap. What do hikers get in return?
NA: Recently I went to Rakiura-Stewart Island for work, and I accidentally left a bag of stuff at Stewart Island Air. I thought, sh*t, I’m not going to be down there for ages. And so I messaged a trail angel in Bluff and said, hi, I did the trail a couple of years ago, I’m so sorry, do you reckon you could pick up my bag from Invercargill airport and hang onto it for me until I get down there again? And he did.
I didn’t stay with him or anything, he’s just an angel. That’s just a real indication to me of this bond between walkers and trail angels — and often trail angels have been walkers, or want to be.
So I really felt I’d entered a family of people who were interested in the trail. But in return I wanted to be a good guest. Like, I wanted to represent walkers well.
It’s kind of like, you know, I lived in South Korea for three years and I wanted to represent my country well! I felt like I was on a school sports team, and I had to respect the community that was providing me with support.
I had that feeling the whole way on TA… I was really happy to enter the TA community. And I was grateful, happy, and anxious about being a good member of the TA community, and I always will be, I think.
But I didn’t think, ‘I’m putting in that amount of money and I need to get back that much value’. It’s just respect. You’re just respecting the trail. It’s an expensive business to maintain tracks and I just… you know, you always bring something when you go to someone’s house. You always bring a bottle of wine, or a packet of f*ckin’ muffins from New World, or something, you know?
[laughter]
And then, there is a whole lot of walkers waiting in the clouds to come down and do TA in the next few years, and you need to think about them as well. Paving the way for them and making their life easier, having facilities available for them, a good environment for them, so you don’t lose them.
TA: How did you find the app? That gets paid for by registrations. As does trail maintenance, on private land and other sections where it isn’t funded by the likes of the Department of Conservation – how was your experience of that? And did you get a sense of the land-use negotiations the Te Araroa Trust does, that type of thing?
NA: The app is so good now. It wasn’t as good when I did TA.
Arriving in Palmerston North on the Manawatū River’s He Ara Kotahi.
Manawatū-Whanganui was a well-done section. You could tell it had a lot of local goodwill behind it. The people of Palmerston North have obviously put the mahi [work] in with the trail. There’s that beautiful shelter they had there [Moturimu Whare in Gordon Kear Forest]. That was really impressive. It was obviously through a landowner agreement.
Or the Mount Linton Station crossing: I felt that had a lot of discussion behind it and a lot of goodwill from the landowner, and I felt like there had been a lot of political work done on Te Araroa’s part. And that’s crucial.
The track just south of Te Kūiti’s been fixed up now – then, it was just a steep, grassy bank and there was no track, really.
TA: Lots of people write about walking TA. But to me your book is different because it’s about the interior experience of doing the trail, as much as the exterior. What’s it like putting all that on the page in such forensic, visceral detail, for the world to read?
NA: I put what I was comfortable with. And it must appear very vulnerable or hard to write but it wasn’t – that book was a total joy.
I mean it’s my diary. Like when there was a storm in Waikato and I had to go and hang out in my tent in a woolshed for two days, just to stay warm. I wrote the entire Stefan chapter on my phone; it was a huge chapter because I was so obsessed with him [laughs]. But really just cos I was so alone, and he was so gorgeous.
And it was such a flashpoint in my and Doug’s marriage, like it was a really interesting experience to go through, but um, I wrote it all on my phone!
And it’s hardly changed from phone or iPad onto the page, a lot of it, there wasn’t much that was edited. And I think it was just all so intense, and so big, all the emotions, it was just easy – the easiest thing I’ve ever written.
And I’ve done a lot of personal writing in columns and personal essays and stuff in the past, so it felt natural.
Because when I got home, I had two weeks to finish it, basically.
So I wrote up the last two or three months in a big, breathless rush and it just, there was so much to choose from that I think the most colourful or intense stuff just came to the surface.
And the rest of it, because I was writing it on the way, it was just what was most immediate, or freshest, or most urgent at the time.
At talks or readings I will read it and be like, god, I can’t believe I put that in, or, I don’t remember putting that in.
I just let it be real and I didn’t have enough time to go back and second-guess it. Because it was due.
TA: All the way through I was going, how is she making this feel so fresh?
NA: Dictaphone! I talked to myself, cos I was alone the whole time. And my phone – I’ve got about 1,200 voice notes. I knew I’d have to audio record because you can’t take notes while you’re walking, because of the poles.
So I’d just put it in my pocket or just hold it, and I recorded everything… cos there was just so much emotion, it was so hard, it was so physically difficult. I thought I was way fitter than I was. I would just walk along talking to this damn thing like it was my friend. And there was nothing else to do – it’s fourteen hours by yourself, I just narrated it, and I think it was an emotional crutch, actually.
I really started transcribing it when I was walking the Kāpiti coast. I was like god, I’ve got to get some of this stuff transcribed, and the auto-transcription did not work at all. So I had a huge list of files in my phone, and I tagged them all red, and then I listened to them on earbuds while typing them up on my phone.
And I was editing the content as I went, so I’d just put down the best stuff, you know, like I would cut out a whole bunch of nonsense. So yeah, I spent the whole Kāpiti beach listening to myself, typing myself out on my phone.
TA: As you walked?!
NA: As I walked [laughs]. Yeah, along the beach, cos you don’t need to look at your feet. So my phone’s in my two hands, my poles are tucked under my arms – it was all very awkward – I’ve got my earbuds in, I’m listening to my audio from like six months ago and typing it out. Or I dictated it – that was less successful, but I put on an American accent, and I quoted myself to the phone’s microphone [laughter].
It was all very laborious, but what else was I going to do? And then walking up the Whanganui River Road, that was 72km of road walking. I had three battery packs so I had good battery life.
And then in the huts, like I’d get into my sleeping bag at 2.30pm in the Tararuas and I just wrote in this haze, absolute flow state, there was no other distractions, no one there, it was freezing, there was no fire, it’s dark in an hour, there’s nothing to do – so that’s what I did. [Writing] became this absolute psychological coping mechanism.
TA: I don’t know how you did it – on trail I fell into my tent wrecked every day, and the last thing I felt like was writing.
NA: Well that was the whole South Island for me, I did a few here and there, but I was so stuffed every night and so sore, I couldn’t really do it. But in the North Island it was darker, I had more time, and I was fitter; I was more alive.
An arbitrary thing called the trail – Motutapu.
TA: It’s in the South bit where you first mention “the magnetic pull of the path ahead, the satisfaction of the miles unwound”, when you talk about “the line” and its pull on you… this, some might say, bizarre fascination with this arbitrary thing called the trail. And that part where your husband is saying, come home and winter over with me. And you say: “But I couldn’t. I couldn’t even explain it. I felt possessed.”
NA: I know, the poor bastard. I was never, ever going to go home [laughs].
TA: All that stuff gives a lot of heart to the book. Because your interior journey is a big part of it, but also there’s a love story. And it’s a really real love story. Like in the Stefan chapter. It’s quite sweet at times, and funny. As well as heartache and all that.
NA: It was very funny. At the time I was like, oh my god, I am sixteen again. But it was just so obvious later what had happened – I was like wow, I got really blindsided there. It was hilarious.
[In the book, Naomi writes: “I realised that after a few months of being alone, I hadn’t been able to cope with the intensity of someone simply perceiving my existence.”]
And the way Doug just let me go – it was really quite remarkable.
TA: You’re real about all that: the whole theme of loneliness and how you battled it. I liked how you didn’t pull a veil over that.
NA: It turned out to sum up the whole thing. A lot of us might be surprised when we get a bit older and find ourselves experiencing more solitude, how bloody awful it can be. So I felt like I was getting an insight into what it would be like to maybe get forgotten about, maybe in your 70s or 80s, and what that must feel like. I definitely felt that, like away from the world, like I was orbiting Earth in a spaceship [laughs].
The day before finishing – Ninety Mile Beach.
TA: And yet it gave you the space to write, and became a key part of the book. You kept tending toward solitude — you chose to go northbound, which instantly makes you more isolated because there are fewer NOBOs; and secondly you did a lot of it in winter, when nobody’s doing the trail. At times I was thinking, is she just trying to make life hard for herself?!
NA [laughs]: No, no, no! Oh god no, it was just all accidents, one after the other. It just turned out the way it turned out, with my own foibles and… And yeah, I didn’t want to stop, I wanted to do it all in one go. I’d always wanted to. So that was what just had to happen.
TA: I think it’s made it a better book.
NA: Well, it turned out to be something different. I wanted to do the classic journey, do it southbound, do it with friends. Have the trail family become a part of it [the book]; but it just didn’t happen.
TA: Also the solitude and all that becomes a good counterpoint to what happens to you toward the end – pretty much a happy ending. And I just think that works so much better because of all the grim hardship that’s gone before! [laughter]
NA: I was so high! Like, I came home a completely different person. Like everyone was shocked. I was so high off that trail.
(Then I kind of went back to my old self and now, 18 months on, I’m kind of coming back to who I was at the end of the trail.)
I felt so free, and so young. And so full of love and happiness. It was intense. Gratitude. So, I don’t know – what came out, came out.
TA: I liked the whole thing of your experiencing an “anarchic ferocity” on the trail, how you felt at times feral, like an animal. Was that a kind of stripping away of the comfortable defences we wrap ourselves in?
NA: Yeah – the distractions from your feelings… I think tramping alone for more than a week, that’s when the magic starts to happen, every time, without trying. Day three, you start to quieten down. After a week, you’re part of the natural world again.
If you’re not on your phone, nothing is distracting you from whatever needs to come up. In Waikato that process was well underway in me, and I just felt really free of stuff that had weighed me down till that point in my life.
TA: You had all this inner healing and wellbeing going on, and yet, again, there’s a counterpoint. Towards the end you decide to push yourself really hard, walk all night through Northland’s Raetea forest, notorious as one of the toughest days on the whole trail: “I decided to blitz the last 165km as fast as possible, and destroy myself as much as I could in the process. Just to see what I could do.” There’s a lot of humour in how you describe what happens next – yomping up 90 Mile Beach and your toes are falling off, you’re half-dressed and it’s just chaotic…
NA [laughing]: And my underwear’s drying on my pack…
TA: And you meet these two poor, newly minted southbounders at your last campsite, Twilight Beach, and you say something like: I was not an appropriate sight for their newby eyes…
NA: For their pristine white Crocs. Yeah. No, it was… I felt dragged from the madhouse. Cos it was so windy, the weather was so bad. You know, it was just that “clinging on” sort of thing. I felt like I was representing the whole thing, well, correctly, but it shocked them.
It was a funny bookend to who I saw when I first started, which was that guy coming down his final stretch toward Bluff, completely ragged, skinny as hell, sun-browned, going at pace – he’d already done 30km that day.
TA: Did you ever feel a tension between experience, and capturing the experience? Like wanting to put your dictaphone aside and just be there?
NA: No, cos I was there, and when something happened it was a pleasure to talk about it (to myself) [laughs]. And there were so many moments of just being.
Waiau Hut in North Canterbury.
It’s funny, when I met people, often I would be thinking in the back of my head: sh*t, you need to try to remember this, this is f*ckin’ brilliant, this is hilarious. And if I left them soon enough I would write it all down in my notes app, what was said. I would say oh my god I’m writing a book, can I put that in, or something.
But there was so much good stuff that I know I never got down, or I didn’t have my writer hat on. But there was so much content, I wasn’t worried.
There were entire parts of the country I just skipped over because I didn’t get around to recording them.
Like I didn’t do anything on the Takitimus and there was so much drama during that, Jesus… But I just had to move the narrative on.
So it was narrative first. But it was a pleasure to be engaged in that project at the same time. I love writing.
TA: Finally, is there anything you’d like to say to people considering walking Te Araroa?
NA: So much… do a lot of walking in wet, sandy feet before you start – get an idea of where the hotspots are on your feet.
And delay it. Save up enough money, if you can, to be able to make choices that you know you aren’t going to regret later. I met a lot of people who were skipping sections because they had to get home or whatever, and who were really gutted about it.
I would say if you’re travelling all the way to New Zealand, give yourself the full visa time, and enough resources. It’s going to be more expensive than you think.
And it’s so life-changing, it’s like university or something — it needs to be given the full force of all your resources, and all your time.
And if that means delaying, I think that’s a good idea.
It’s not a cheap trip but it will shift you in ways… I would just immerse yourself in the whole thing.
Find out more about Naomi and buy her book.
More Trail Stuff:
Register for Te Araroa here
Read about what trail registration pays for here
All photos courtesy of Naomi Arnold.
