I’d tried to keep my boots clean by jumping over brown puddles and skirting the edges of dank pools, but Raetea Forest in Northland was having none of that. The puddles and pools just got bigger the further I trudged. This forest is notorious for mud, and it was inevitable that I would be forced to succumb. 

And it sucked. Like a vortex. At my boots and my legs, trying to drag me to the bottom of the world. More than once the mud almost had my boot in its grasp but I somehow wrestled free, only to be caught again a few steps later. 

The torturous game of cat and mouse seemed never-ending and time seemed to stretch and warp. I checked my watch. Just ten minutes since I’d last looked. I gazed behind at the trail of sludge pockmarked with boot prints. Progress was excruciatingly slow. 

The rumours about this forest were true. Knee-deep mud, unruly vines and the risk of getting lost. I felt like Indiana Jones – only less heroic.

This may not have been a Peruvian jungle with hidden treasures, but Raetea Forest, just south of Kaitāia, had legendary status all the same. The 18km track, which takes in the 744m Raetea summit, features early in the southbound Te Araroa. It’s part of the section known as the Northland forests, and its reputation for mud precedes it. 

At the south end of Ninety Mile Beach, in Ahipara and also in Kaitāia, there was murmuring among walkers who wondered how bad the mud would actually be. Trail notes warned it could take more than eight hours to tramp the 18km, but to possibly expect 12–15 hours.

The naïve among us chortled, not believing that could be possible; the cautious decided to quit while ahead and opted to hitch to Mangamuka at the other end. Some of us scrolled through social media videos and photos of walkers who had gone before. We joked. It didn’t look that bad. 

It turns out that a video or a photo may not capture the full 12-hour experience. 

First, it was the vines. Spindly fingers swarmed across the forest canopy to catch on pack straps and trip up wayward feet. Then it was the mud – lashings of mud. It started as a novelty: nothing too concerning, more an intellectual challenge as I searched for the best way to avoid getting muddy boots. But as the puddles turned to pools and sludge to slush, avoidance was impossible. The only thing to do was to wade into the muck. 

Grey and brown muck that smelt of death and decay and the sweet hint of a long drop toilet. Sometimes mushy, sometimes watery, sometimes whipped like chocolate mousse. Muck with splotches of rainbowed oil and green with slime. Every type of muck imaginable. And it seemed never-ending.

By the ninth hour I had sprained my ankle, fallen over five times, become lost, nearly lost my boots and almost lost my soul. So when I emerged from the trees onto a gently sloping green field 12 hours later, hot tears pricked my eyes.   

I hobbled downhill as the sun retreated and stumbled into the makeshift campsite on the outskirts of Mangamuka. In the half-light I surveyed the damage: mud painted my legs and was splattered on every inch of my person and pack. It was etched into the creases of my palms and wedged under my nails. 

“Even if someone offered me a million dollars, there is no way in hell I would walk through that forest again,” I told two other southbound walkers. “That was something else, but man, what a sense of achievement!” They agreed, as they bent their backs to wash their socks in the river for the third time.  

The days passed as I tramped south, and stories reached my ears. Stories of walkers who had given up on the forests, too disenchanted with the mud. By the time I reached the Richmond Ranges of the South Island, Raetea Forest had gone from my mind. But northbound walkers I met brought tales of Southland’s Longwood Forest, just west of Invercargill. Like Raetea, its reputation for mud precedes it. Word on the trail was that they were on a par. 

Emergent memories of Raetea Forest brought me out in a cold sweat. Would Longwoods really be as bad? 

The beginning was along a pleasant forestry road that slipped behind green foliage and entered the cool and shadowed depths of the forest. Mud was the least of my worries as I struggled to follow a light ground trail that wound through the undergrowth as if charted by a bee drunk on nectar. Any mud was easily negotiated – even a particularly large boggy patch – and I smiled to myself, smug that I might get through without triggering a mud-related panic attack. 

But despite the sea views from Bald Hill (805m), my smile disappeared. A French northbound couple claimed the section after the old quarry was muddy. The brown line below their knees was all the proof I needed. 

The further I trudged, the worse the mud got. Brown clag was replaced by gloop. I stared at the pools forlornly and tried to tiptoe along their precarious edges, clinging to any bit of bush that would hold my weight. Success became relative.

“You’re sweet after the summit,” another northbounder said as he waded through a puddle, mud at his calves. “There’s very little mud. Not like this.” 

I walked through the summit’s tussock, hanging onto the northbounder’s words, expecting the ground to become suddenly crisp like a potato chip. A few more steps and it’ll be solid earth, I thought. It was a mantra that followed me all the way to Martin’s Hut, but the reality remained elusive. 

Yet I couldn’t help but feel this was nowhere near the nightmare Raetea had been. I hadn’t slipped over and my boots, though muddy, were rescuable and my sanity still intact. 

At the rustic hut, built in 1905 for water-race maintenance workers during the gold-mining era, a line of dank and defiled footwear lay outside. As the night drew in the socks and shoes were moved inside to hang in front of a fickle fire in the vain hope they would be dry by morning. 

Not that it really mattered. The new day brought more mud on the downward stretch towards Colac Bay. Yet with every twist through the vibrant jungle of green fern the mud seemed to improve until it was no longer mud at all but gravel and tarmac all the way to the sea. 

I asked some other walkers how they thought the Longwoods compared to Raetea. A German lad shook his head. “The Longwood Forest was not as bad.” His head continued to shake. “Raetea was the worst.”