Tell us a few of the highlights and lowlights from the South Island part of your journey.

One of the lowlights was definitely the physical toll the trail took early on. Because nearly everyone starts in the north and walks southbound, they have the entire North Island to warm up before hitting the big ranges in the south. Northbounders have to tackle 1000m + peaks quite early and in some cases several of those over a few days. I was absolutely exhausted, beyond anything I’d ever experienced, very quickly, and spent most nights trying to sleep with what felt like aching bones and feet, and the electrical-feeling shocks of overuse. But my body gradually adapted to where I sometimes felt so good I jogged along the trail. The greatest gift that Te Araroa gave me was knowledge of how fit I could get and how wonderful it felt. Seven months on it’s hard to remember how strong and fleet I felt in the last half of the trail especially, but it is nice to know that level of fitness is achievable.

In the campground kitchen at the Colac Bay Tavern and Holiday Park I meet Sean, an Irish hiker who is walking south and nearly finished with the trail. He tramped 46 kilometres over the tough Longwood Range the day before, which astonishes me; my first biggish day, 27 kilometres along the flat Ōreti Beach, had completely destroyed me.

“I’m ruined,” he says. “Are you headed north?”

“Yup.”

He indicates my hiking pants and says, “You don’t want to wear those in the Longwoods.”

“Why not?”

“They...

An interview with Naomi Arnold on Bookenz, New Zealand's longest-running book review show.

It was almost nine months of walking through mud, tramping mostly solo and a frightening experience with a lightning storm.

But Naomi Arnold is not ruling out doing the Te Araroa track again, this time in the opposite direction. She said it was her long-held dream to walk the track, which covers the length of New Zealand.

At the end of 2023, she finally set off from Bluff on her way to covering more than 3000km. The adventure is now vividly covered in her book released earlier this month, Northbound: Four Seasons of Solitude on Te Araroa, and she plans to visit Timaru in June to talk about it.

Nelson writer Naomi Arnold set out to fulfil a 20-year dream of walking the length of New Zealand. She speaks to Charles Anderson about life on the trail, traversing
mountains, rivers, cities, from summer to spring, walking on through days of thick mud, blazing sun and lightning storms, and into cold, starlit nights.

On Boxing Day in 2023, journalist and author Naomi Arnold left Bluff and spent the next nine months walking the 3000km length of New Zealand. In this extract from her book about the journey, Northbound, she describes a long day and a scary night.

The big news of the week in New Zealand literature was the publication, instant success, and laudatory review of the book I declare is the best book of 2025 so far – Northbound by Nelson writer Naomi Arnold. It's whizzed into number 5 on the Nielsen BookScan nonfiction chart in its first week in the shops and I hope it stays somewhere or other on the bestseller chart for weeks or months to come. The author tells her tale of hiking the Te Araroa trail from south to north. It's an epic trek. It gets hard, it gets dangerous; and it also gets intimate. God only knows what the walk itself takes out of you but I'm just as fascinated in the challenge it takes to write about. All the usual questions of memoir – how to make it interesting to others, how much to reveal, how much to conceal – were at stake for the author as she sat down to write Northbound. Naomi has risen to the occasion.

I am scarcely surprised. She has always had a remarkable talent. I first met her at an unlikely place: Scott Base. We were both there on assignment. Naomi was just starting her career in journalism as a student at Canterbury. She was lively, funny, observant, inquisitive; she also had a certain poise to her. That was in 2009. Not too long after that she joined the Nelson Mail, and quickly emerged as the most interesting new writer in New Zealand journalism, alongside the newspaper's other new recruit, Charlie Anderson. Both wrote features; both wrote personal columns; both were class acts.

A Q&A with award-winning Nelson nature and science writer, and former Nelson Mail journalist Naomi Arnold.

Naomi's new book Northbound takes readers on the length-of-New Zealand Te Araroa trail, complete with out-of-body experiences, quirky companions, joy, despair and reflections on solitude.

Could you expand a bit more on "the trail was haunting me" motivation?

I first encountered Te Araroa in Geoff Chapple’s 2002 book Te Araroa: One Man Walks His Dream. Chapple, the trail's founder along with his wife Miriam Beatson, wrote about the long struggle to establish a walking route the length of New Zealand, and then about the experience of walking this rough line on a map. I decided then and there I’d walk it myself one day. Once the trail opened in 2011 I kept coming across its signs everywhere around New Zealand, as well as meeting people who were walking it. Because the trail follows established walking and tramping tracks, such as in Nelson Lakes National Park, I kept finding myself walking on it, too. It took more than 20 years but I finally managed to walk it myself in 2024.

What was tramping through winter like?

Dark, crisp and cold, dodging occasional rain and storms. I was very lucky with the weather. The days were short, though, which meant the sun disappeared around 2 or 3pm and there were a lot of long, cold lonely nights in which I wrote Northbound on my iPad. Because I was alone I had to be cautious with weather, rivers and in more isolated areas.

Journalist and author Naomi Arnold spent nine months walking the Te Araroa trail. She walked south to north and experienced painful loneliness, fear, injuries and exhaustion amongst moments of exhilaration. Naomi joins Jim to talk about her book Northbound: Four Seasons of Solitude on Te Araroa.

In 2023, journalist Naomi Arnold left her family home and spent nearly nine months walking the length of New Zealand. In this extract from her new book Northbound: Four seasons of solitude on Te Araroa, Arnold writes of the shock of loneliness and the power of solitude.

I love everything Naomi writes. She was part of a miracle generation of literary journalists alongside Greg Bruce, Aimee Cronin, Charlie Anderson, Al Bone, Peter Malcouronne, Anna Rankin, Tess McClure and Jessica McAllen, all of them gifted and brilliant; Northbound might be Naomi’s masterpiece.