Food
We guess, that is a essential question while planing the trip. Mainly, it is important to evaluate two main topics in advance: water and food supply.
WATER:
New Zealand is quite wet. This can be pretty annoying, while walking in the rain for days or when high tides make it difficult or impossible to cross a river. But the bright side is, that we don't expect it to be super hard to have enough water supply. At our Hinchinbrook Island hike in Australia (2014) this happened to us and that was not a lot of fun. 28°C, 90% humidity and 200 ml left, this is when adrenalin kicks in.... Anyways, we both are going to carry a 2L bladder, connected to a sawyer mini filter. Just in case we will take some chemical water treatment tablets as well. It's always good to be mindful in farming areas. This hopefully saves a lot of toilet paper....
FOOD:
I find this topic quite challenging. The food supply options on the South Island of New Zealand, especially in the northern part, are a little bit tricky. Mostly there are two limiting factors:
The longest section in the wilderness without any supply options is between 7 to 10 days long. It is important to carry food for at least one extra day (bad weather, health issues etc.). If you calculate 800g p.P./day with a density of 500-600kcal/100g x 10 days you end up with 8kg p.P. to carry additionally to your permanent luggage. This is the point you remember, that you want to keep your pack as light weight as possible. Some villages we'll pass won't have a fully equipped supermarket. Therefore, it is quite common to send "Bounce boxes" ahead of you, containing useful produce and products such as couscous, pasta, batteries, dehydrated food etc. So far we plan to send four of them from Wellington ahead of us.
It is quite important to keep the balance between balanced nutrition, costs and tastiness. The easiest option is to use specialised, dehydrated back-country meals. A large variety of meal options exists and they are supposed to be quite tasty als well. On the down side, the costs for those are very high: 7-15NZ$/meal. However, I am quite sure, we'll have some from time to time. In the morning we'll probably mostly eat oats with cinnamon, dried fruits or what else is tasty with it. For snacks and lunch, we'll still have to figure out what is working best for us. At dinner time, we'll have a mix of couscous, noodles, backcountry food and anything else we'll like over there. Some hikers even decide to not carry a stove. I guess, this won't work for us. You never know, how desperately you'll need a hot drink and it simply gives you a bit more of variation in times of chewy monotony.
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