When they’re not presenting the news or questioning politicians, Jenny Suo, Isobel Ewing and Jack Tame can be found with their hiking boots on.
TVNZ reporter and presenter Suo loves a hike where no one can reach her. When New Zealand entered its second round of level 4 lockdown last August, she was in the South Island filming a profile on Blackball, an old mining town. Because she was so close to the Paparoa Track, she decided to do the walk and meet the production team when she came out.
“I walked out on the last day thinking it was weird that no one was there to meet me,” she says.
“I turned on my phone and had so many messages, like ‘how are you going to get home?’.”
Suo didn’t grow up with camping holidays or hiking. She started exploring Auckland’s west coast in her early 20s and became hooked.
“I got bitten by the bug and it’s become my therapy,” she says. “I’m fascinated by funny plants and I was one of those rock pool kids.”
In her late 20s Suo met her partner Michael, who also loves walking, and they’ve gone on amazing adventures together around New Zealand. Trips to Mt Aspiring National Park and walking the Te Paki Coastal Track have been some of her favourites. They also love backcountry tramping.
Summiting Tititea / Mt Aspiring and Aoraki / Mt Cook are both on her bucket list but, as she says, “You need good skills to do that.”
“I have a little list at home that gets bigger and bigger the more I travel. I also want to do all the Great Walks.”
Suo’s must-haves for tramping and especially to backcountry huts are a personal locator beacon, an eye mask and ear plugs.
And then there are snacks. Suo and Michael always take dark chocolate and Ginger Nuts, and have a tradition of cooking a risotto from scratch.
“We always take a cheesy, mushroomy risotto. It takes two hours (to make) but it’s amazing.” Suo says “it’s a bit unnecessary”, but it’s become an ongoing joke.
The journalist’s time in the outdoors has inspired her to tell more stories about nature, the environment and conservation. Seeing so much of the country’s natural landscape has made her realise why it’s worth saving.
“I want to show Kiwis why we’re really lucky to live here,” she says.
Newshub political reporter Isobel Ewing went tramping every year with her family from the age of seven. Now, she says, she needs to get outside for sanity and will shoehorn it into her life.
“I love feeling insignificant and how the world keeps turning and nature keeps doing what it’s always done, despite us,” she says. “Getting into places that are remote and beautiful is something I love, and it always recharges me.”
Ewing’s biggest adventure was in 2019 when she and her brother cycled 2500km of the Silk Road between Samarkand in Uzbekistan and Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan.
Ewing wanted to do something that pushed her out of her comfort zone, to find her capabilities.
“It was the hardest I’ve ever pushed my body, in the most remote places I’d ever been to,” she says. “Beforehand, the more I read about it the more I was like, wow, this is a part of the world that, especially in New Zealand, we don’t even think about.”
The trip gave Ewing huge perspective in both her personal and professional life.
Now if anything is getting on top of her, she reminds herself that nothing is as hard as biking up mountains on very little sleep and not enough food.
She loves the simplicity of packing just the bare essentials, saying there is a beauty to it. For all of her adventures, her must-have items are her inflatable Sea to Summit pillow and good trail shoes.
“For years I just did the classic roll up all your clothes and use that as your pillow, and then as the night goes on it gets into all these weird shapes and it’s not comfortable at all.
“My trail shoes are lightweight and give me that confidence to move fast and know I’m not going to slip.”
Ewing has a passion for New Zealand’s native wildlife and says it is a big part of what drives her into the hills. Earlier this year she did the North West Circuit on Rakiura / Stewart Island and saw a kiwi in broad daylight.
“It was the most remarkable, magical experience,” she says.
Now based in the press gallery, Ewing says she doesn’t have as much time to go tramping as she’d like. However, her experiences in nature have helped shape the way she does her job. She has become a climate correspondent for Newshub and says she helps to give nature a voice.
“It’s kind of a dream to try and mesh the two.”
While Q+A presenter Jack Tame says he doesn’t have nearly as much experience as Suo and Ewing, he’s certainly got a long list of adventures under his belt.
When he was a child, his parents would march him and his three siblings out of the house and into the bush to tramp.
“Of course, as children we hated it,” says Tame. “Mum and Dad had to bribe us every 45 minutes with various chocolate bars and things to keep us going.”
But as he’s got older, he has come to appreciate those early experiences and how important it is to surround yourself in nature.
In his early 20s he started tramping on Banks Peninsula and in Mt Somers.
“In one sense, I’m a real city person; I enjoy the stimulus that comes from being in big cities – and big foreign cities in particular,” he says. “But there’s another side to me that absolutely loves getting away from any sign of human existence.”
When it comes to the gear Tame can’t tramp without, he’s aware that he’s unconventional.
He swears by walking poles, but just one.
“I don’t like tramping with two and I really don’t like tramping with none, but I love tramping with one and I treat it almost like a walking stick.
“My legs are pathetically spindly. I’m already at the stage of life where I find going downhill a bit of a challenge if I don’t cushion the fall.”
He’s also got a sweet tooth when it comes to his hiking snack of choice.
“I love to disappear into the bush with a pack, a walking pole and a kilogram of pick-and-mix lollies.”
Tame is originally from Christchurch but his family now lives in Golden Bay where he can explore Kahurangi National Park.
“Often over summer I get a month or two off, and it’s a good opportunity for me to kind of disappear,” he says. “Kahurangi has a really diverse range of landscapes.”
Next on his list is to make it to the Kahurangi lighthouse, but it takes some planning.
The trek has to be timed with the tides and there are a few river crossings.
“You have to make your way down from Golden Bay, across to the West Coast, and then you’ve got to cross two or three rivers in order to walk along the coast and find your own way to the lighthouse. It’s super remote and it’s very much the wild west out there.”
Tame knows personally what can happen when you time things wrongly. Last year his father John attempted the Boulder Lake Track in Kahurangi National Park in winter and fell down a bank, breaking his back.
At one point he had been awake in the bush for 36 hours straight and was delirious and hallucinating. He became hypothermic. When he finally could think clearly, he used his personal locator beacon and was winched out by the rescue helicopter.
“This (past) summer Dad had improved a lot, and even though he wasn’t back to 100 per cent, he was much healthier, so over Christmas we took him back and completed the track.
“We took him up there so that he could tick it off.”
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