About Me

Hi there! Welcome to my blog. I’m Jonathan, a 24 year old hiking enthusiast, avgeek, bird lover, disc golfer, and recent aerospace engineering graduate from Brisbane, Australia. As much as I’d love to talk about my love of all things aircraft, I’m gonna save you all a great deal of boredom, as this blog will be focussed on my adventures out on the trail. Specifically, my plan to complete a thru-hike of Te Araroa in New Zealand.

Birb

I have been going on hiking trips with my family since I was a small child. Nothing crazy long, of course, but enough that I developed a strong passion for getting outdoors and seeing where my feet could take me. As I got older, the trails we went on became longer and more remote, but never more than day trips, always returning to civilisation by nightfall. Being half-Kiwi, many of these trips happened in Aotearoa and I quickly fell in love with its natural beauty. By the time I did the Tongariro Alpine Crossing in 2015, I knew that I wanted to do a step further and take on a multi-day trip, which landed me on the Milford Track in 2017. A couple years later, I followed this up with an attempted crossing of the Routeburn Track (imagine getting snowed on in November) and the successful completion of the Kepler Track in 2019 with my younger sibling Eli, along with the Three Capes Track and Tongariro Northern Circuit in 2022.

Throughout this whole period, I was also studying at uni, first in a Bachelor of Arts before transferring to engineering in 2019. By mid-2021, I began pondering what I wanted to do after I graduated. The smart move would’ve been to transition immediately into full-time work in an engineering firm’s graduate engineering program. Trouble is, I would be finishing mid-year and these programs only commence at the start of each year. Also… full-time work at that point in my life just seemed really dull and I particularly hated the idea that I would only get 4 weeks of the year to do whatever I wanted to. I had heard of Te Araroa by this point but had never properly looked into it as something to do. On a whim in August 2021, I started making a plan just for the fun of it, and as I went through the trail notes, my thoughts shifted from…

“This would be so cool, but it’s so long, I’d never be able to do it.”

…to…

“Actually, maybe I could do this.”

…to finally going…

“Aight, bet.”

Fast forward a couple years, and it’s starting to become very real. I am about to spend around 4.5 months walking 3000 km from the top to the bottom of New Zealand. If you would like to follow my journey, this is the place to be. I will also be taking a camera with me to make some rather janky vlogs of the trip, which you will be able to find on my YouTube channel linked below (same name as this blog).