This two to three days adventure on the south-eastern border of the King country is a good weekend get-out or if you are cycling through NZ it’s a welcome change from the roads and car traffic. Plus it is on the easy side as it’s mostly downhill... once you’ve passed the initial climb. Access By car: Ongarue is 263 km or 3 hours 30 minutes drive from Auckland. Pureroa is 253 km and 3 hours 20 minutes. By bike: the trail end at Ongarue is accessible via quiet backcountry roads. Pureroa is on the busier SH30 but it still is not too bad. From the east you can join the Waikato River (...)

The Kaimai Range is a small mountain range between the Bay of Plenty and Waikato, between the Coromandel and Mamaku ranges. Just a 2 hours drive from Auckland, it offers a lot of great tramping options for weekends and even more. And in contrast with the Coromandel huts, most of the huts in the Kaimais are basic, meaning only $5 and no need to book. This place is often ignored by tourists who just drive from Coromandel to Rotorua, making it a perfect weekend escape, away from the crowds. Plus it has so many things to see, between old tramway tracks, tunnels, mountains, amazing bush and tracks, (...)

We were wet, cold, and overly miserable after 3 hours of walking in knee-deep mud under light rain. Arriving at the summit of The Cone, we were in thick clouds. The supposedly magnificent views you should get from the 953 meters summit were nowhere to be seen, and we still had more than one hour of walking to get to the hut, continuously going up and down on the ridge, trying to avoid the deeper mud pools. But this is when, jumping from side to side, climbing steep wet roots, with no views, feeling the beginning of a blister on my left foot, laughing at those ridiculous short boardwalks (...)

This is a nice day walk that will make you exercise with a tad more than 1,050 metres to climb and descend in the day, starting from sea level up to the summit of Kohukohunui at 688 metres. The main interest of this walk are the superb views you will get on the Firth of Thames, the Coromandel Peninsula, Auckland city and the Manukau Harbour. If the weather looks bad and you might get no views you can probably skip this one, as there’s 50% of wide, muddy, not too interesting tracks. Access This walk starts from the Waharau Regional Park visitor centre. Car: 1 hour 30 minutes drive from (...)

Access Car: 2 hours (135 km) drive from Auckland CBD to the end of Kaueranga Valley Rd. Bicycle: train to Papakura train station, cycle 85 km to Thames (6-8 hrs), then 22 km along Kaueranga Valley Rd (gravel), lots of paid campsites along this road. Public transport: poor, you can take the bus (InterCity, Naked Bus, etc.) to Thames, but you will still have to do the 22 km of (mostly gravel) road to the start of the walk. You could hitch a ride, especially on Saturday mornings with all the people going there, or you could try to contact local tour companies, like CanyoNZ, they usually go (...)