Escarpment

Aban­doned rail­way sta­tions. Pre­cari­ous swing­bridges over pre­cip­it­ous chasms. Hid­den val­leys full of lush forest. Rem­nants of ancient kāinga.

Those might not be what you’d expect from the recently-opened Paekakariki Escarp­ment track. I cer­tainly expec­ted rugged land­scapes and mag­ni­fi­cent views, and you get those in abund­ance, but there’s much more here to be dis­covered than you might ima­gine from passing by on the train or coastal high­way.

For such a diverse and often dra­mat­ic track, it’s remark­ably easy to reach from the city. The best access is by train, since each end is a short walk from a sta­tion on the Kāpiti line. There’s some inform­a­tion on the Te Araroa site, but unfor­tu­nately no map yet, so I made one on Google Maps show­ing the track, with access from rail­way sta­tions at either end (I’ll add it to Open­Street­Map when I get the chance).

If you start from Pukerua Bay sta­tion, the easi­est way is to cross the tracks, take a short­cut through the play­ground to Sea Vista Dr, cut across the grass at Muri reserve, then fol­low the Te Araroa signs east along the rail­way cor­ridor. This first stretch is less pic­tur­esque than the main track, being sand­wiched between the main trunk line and private land stud­ded with KEEP OUT signs, but if you’re the sort of weirdo who appre­ci­ates edge­lands land­scapes and crum­bling infra­struc­ture, there’s plenty to keep you inter­ested. The recently decom­mis­sioned Muri Sta­tion still bears a cheer­ful mur­al, but encroach­ing graf­fiti and broken win­dows lend it an eer­ie out-of-time aura. Fur­ther along, an ivy-encrus­ted con­crete shel­ter shows signs of unof­fi­cial adapt­ive reuse: someone installed a large gas bar­be­cue with­in its spalling walls, and that too is now suc­cumb­ing to rust and creep­ers.

Once the rail­way reaches the tun­nels, the walk­ing track rap­idly ascends. I thought I was being clev­er by tak­ing the “down­hill” route, but the track jags sharply up and down so much that even in this dir­ec­tion the total ascent is nearly 500m, com­pared to 580m in the south­bound dir­ec­tion (for com­par­is­on, Mt Kaukau is 445m above sea level). It’s not a hard­core tramp­ing track, but it’s no walk in the park either, with unfor­giv­ing sets of ver­ti­gin­ous steps that are an acro­phobe’s worst night­mare. On a clear, still day the end­less views and crys­tal­line waters below will take away what breath you have left. In a howl­ing northerly…well, you’d have to be a lot braver than me to attempt it.

I expec­ted the land­scape to be mag­ni­fi­cent though largely bar­ren: crum­bling grey­wacke and rank grass inter­spersed with gorse, harakeke and tight clumps of windswept mingimingi. Cer­tainly, these spe­cies dom­in­ated the exposed bluffs, but as the path ducked into rav­ines I found brief, wel­come shade in patches of regen­er­at­ing māhoe and kawakawa. It was an even more pleas­ant sur­prise when the track began to snake inland into cool, dark hanging val­leys, invis­ible from the coast below, full of fruit­ing kohekohe. This rel­at­ive of trop­ic­al mahogany used to dom­in­ate the west­ern hills from Karori to Kāpiti , and in pro­tec­ted areas you still find dense stands: some­times gnarled and twis­ted from the ele­ments; some­times tall and proud. They have the unusu­al habit of cauli­flory, where the flowers and fruits spring dir­ectly from the trunks, and right now many of them are in full fruit.

The north­ern­most sec­tion stays rel­at­ively close to sea level, and is a mosa­ic of open coun­try (dusty trails scen­ted by sun-bruised fen­nel) and patches of regen­er­at­ing forest, much of the lat­ter thanks to the volun­teers of the Ngā Ururoa pro­ject. But the plant­ing star­ted much earli­er: groves of glossy karaka and papery-leaved whau, this far south of their nat­ur­al range, are likely to have been planted by south­ward-migrat­ing iwi, used for food and wood respect­ively. In the photo below, the dark veget­a­tion in the middle dis­tance is all that remains of Pari Pari kāinga. The ter­raced gar­dens of this Te Ātiawa vil­lage are long gone, lost to erosion and to the rail­way con­struc­tion that also demol­ished the once-fam­ous arch­way on this head­land.

The last few kilo­metres are easy going, though some of it is along­side SH1. Don’t both­er try­ing to cross over to the Fish­er­mans Table: press on to Paekakariki itself, where there are some decent cafés (anoth­er reas­on to take the north­bound route).