December 29, 2021
It’s easy to overlook what’s on the back doorstep, and that’s the case with Trelissick Park in Ngaio Gorge — we’ve walked it only once before. So we decided we’d walk into town through the park. We still had a fair bit of road walking to do, but the park provided shady, pleasant going for the middle part of the walk.
Before we started the park section, we had a footpath walk from home to our nearest entry point on Churchill Drive, near Crofton Downs train station. That was a decent enough walk in itself for us. The two coffee spot stops along the way were both closed for the holiday period, but luckily the station’s coffee cart was open so we weren’t deprived of our morning caffeine fix.
It’s tricky trying to retrace on the map our exact path through the park, given the number of intersecting tracks within it. A section of the Northern Walkway, which starts in Johnsonville and ends in Kelburn, runs through the park, and it also is part of the Sanctuary to Sea walk, which goes through Otari Wilton’s Bush and the Karori cemetery to the Zealandia wildlife sanctuary. Those walks, though, go in the opposite (uphill) direction from our route, which took us along the Kaiwharawhara Stream until we left the park at the beginning of the Ngaio Gorge Road stabilisation road works. From there it was a trudge along Kaiwharawhara Road, Hutt Road and Thorndon Quay to the railway station, where we caught a train home. That took all of 20 minutes, compared with about three hours to get there. L says we completed part of Te Araroa trail (North Cape to Bluff) — the section from Mitre 10 by the Crofton Downs railway station to Spotlight at the entrance to Ngaio Gorge.
Off Highway One 