How to ride New Zealand’s Timber Trail without blowing your budget — or busting a gut
Ancient podocarp forest, soaring suspension bridges and oodles of history make the Timber Trail one of New Zealand’s best cycling experiences.
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New Zealand
‘We can hear ourselves think again’: Stillness descends on Mangamuka as highway closes for the second time in two years
Two years ago a massive slip wiped out a highway and turned Mangamuka into a ghost town. Now it’s happened again.
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Auckland’s island escape: Great Barrier’s Aotea Track
The island boasts spectacular beaches, hot springs, raucous birdlife and lush forest — and it’s just half an hour from Auckland by plane.
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Fiordland’s Hollyford Valley: A walk back in time
Where experiencing one of New Zealand’s wildest places doesn’t mean you have to go without fine food and lodgings.
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Portmeirion of the south: How the most remarkable village in Wales was almost built in New Zealand
Village’s creator had a “serious flirtation” with an island in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf before choosing a bay near his home in Wales instead.
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Being Dutch: What my heritage means to me
What does it mean to be a New Zealander of Dutch descent? And what if the country of my ancestors decides I no longer belong?
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Project Island Song: Return of the giants
An ambitious ecological restoration project aims to return a small corner of New Zealand to the way it was before humans arrived.
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Braving New Zealand’s Old Ghost Road
One of New Zealand’s newest dual-use tramping and mountain bike trails, the 85km-long Old Ghost Road is also one of the most spectacular.
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Getting high in Northland: A peak-bagger’s guide to the North’s 10 highest mountains
How to climb Northland’s highest peaks — well, some of them anyway — and where to find them.
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Paparoa Track: NZ’s newest Great Walk
A practical guide to Aotearoa’s 10th Great Walk and the tragic story behind it.
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Walking the Queen Charlotte Track (the easy way)
The 70km Queen Charlotte Track offers fabulous views — and plenty of options for walking in comfort — where land meets sea in the Marlborough Sounds.
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Top news photos of 2020
A global pandemic, iwi-led Covid checkpoints, Waitangi Day festivities, politics, record-breaking rainfall, floods and fires — 2020 had it all.
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Takahē and naked trampers on the Heaphy Track
The author encounters takahē, kleptomaniac weka and naked trampers on New Zealand’s longest Great Walk.
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The Te Araroa Project
What drives more than 1000 people a year to walk the length of New Zealand? I decided to find out.
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Sir Hekenukumai Puhipi: The bridge builder
Sir Hek Busby spent a lifetime building bridges – over rivers, between peoples, and across the mighty Pacific Ocean.
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One man’s war: A Hokianga soldier remembers
Bill Guest only left North Hokianga once and reckons it was only luck that brought him back alive. The 96-year-old veteran shares some of the horror, and humour, of World War II.
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Kiwi couple’s answer to the housing crisis: A tiny house on a trailer
Rangimārie Mules and Jared Hiakita didn’t want to start their life together shackled to a giant mortgage. Their solution was a tiny house on a trailer.
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Walking New Zealand’s Hokianga Coastal Track
Three days of wildly beautiful coastline — and chances are you won’t have to share it with anyone.
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Stairway to heaven: Ilchi Lee’s Kerikeri dream
In the bush west of Kerikeri, a small town in northern New Zealand, a Korean spiritual leader says he is building a global headquarters for an organisation of 100 million members.
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Waitangi Day in pictures
A selection of my favourite images from Waitangi Day, the anniversary of the signing of New Zealand’s Treaty of Waitangi, taken since 2010.
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