Hokianga on horseback

The Great New Zealand Trek is the brainchild of Steve Old, who aims to cover a segment of New Zealand from Cape Reinga to Bluff every year to raise funds for multiple sclerosis. Photo / Lindsey Davidson

Claire Trevett saddles up and travels from Rawene to Pouto Point the old-fashioned way.

Felix is a movie star. Tom Cruise rode him in The Last Samurai and Felix had a body double and a makeup artist. He had professional Spanish horse trainers and can do tricks. He is used to better things.

Now Felix is lumped with me for a week as about 230 of us either ride, walk or bike our way through the back country from Rawene in the Hokianga to Pouto Point at the tip of the Kaipara Harbour.

Felix comes gratis of Steve Old, who was once horse co-ordinator for the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Last Samurai.

The Great New Zealand Trek - an ambitious plan to cover a segment of New Zealand every year over 10 years from Cape to Bluff - is his brainchild, born of a desire to open up the countryside to riders and to raise funds for multiple sclerosis, the disease which took his mother.

For this second stage of the trek there are about 120 horses and riders, 75 walkers and 35 mountain bikers, as well as an army of volunteers to move the campsite from place to place as we travel the 200km. The distance was, as Old puts it, five marathons in a row, and simple mathematics suggested four legs was far wiser than two. I never trusted mathematics.

In Rawene, Lindsay - the head wrangler - introduces me to Felix, a solid, chestnut horse with a long, bedraggled, curly mane and a forelock sporting a jaunty twig from rolling in small bushes.

I look at Felix.

"Why is he looking at me funny?" I ask.

Lindsay looks at me funny, sighs, calls out to two other riders to take care of me and disappears.

The trek advisory recommended spending time in the saddle before the trip. It warned the enjoyment of the trek could be ruined by pain. I last sat in a saddle three years ago so decided it was enough to occasionally straddle my office chair backwards.

I also harnessed the powers of creative visualisation and saw myself cantering, laughing, through waters sparkling in the sun and along shade-dappled forest paths. I saw myself sitting at night watching the sunset on the glorious west coast, quaffing an ale. I envisaged myself returning, triumphant and fit, with thighs of such steel they would set off the alarms at airport security checkpoints.

No visualising involved walking so, strangely, by the second day, solace is found in the scenery. Every night Old tells us where we'll be going the next day and the history of the land. He always promises wonderful scenery and there always is wonderful scenery. Just as well because I need a lot of solace.

My ancestors harked from these parts. They arrived from Scotland in the 1800s, gazed out over this scenery and then started thwacking roads through the middle of it so that others with an equal appreciation could cut down all the trees.

Reminders of them lie further inland in headstones in the Matakohe graveyard and at the museum, where my great-great-grandmother's name is on a record of women who voted in the first election after women's suffrage was given.

I'd long wanted to see more of this land without using a car window.

Persistent in the face of even the most obstinate of bureaucratic challenges, Old has managed to cajole and woo farmers, foresters, Landcorp, the Department of Conservation and local iwi into opening land for us.

We ride over ridges on coastal farmland and along logging tracks, edged with forests at various stages of growth. There are tiny gravel country roads crawling though valleys dotted with small houses with overgrown orchards out the back.

The trek was timed to coincide with the full moon, working on the theory that the weather is less volatile at such a time.

It is hot in that dog-end of summer, and we arrive at each night's campsite physically worn and covered in dust.

The days are near flawless and bookended by a moon that turned harbours silver and made ghosts of human figures. They blend into each other, leaving small, sharp cameos in memory.

A gravestone for a soldier in the Maori Battalion, is remembered on the edge of a narrow stone road used by few. A derelict old farmstead at the very top of one of the farms, sits on a cliff overlooking the sea with sweeping views from the very top of Maunganui Bluff.

Trotting along Bayley's Beach to beat the incoming tide, fellow rider Duna gives history lessons, pointing out seams of coal in the cliffs and the corroded remains of a Belgian shipwreck along a coastline renowned for them.

Nearing home at the end of one particularly long day, we hit a traffic jam on a cattle race as the cows are taken in for milking.

We patiently line up behind the swaying, farting rumps as the farm dog works itself into a self-castigating frenzy at suddenly finding it has allowed so many stragglers to sneak in behind it.

Reminders of a world other than our bucolic idyll are infrequent - a Subway wrapper on the beach, two jet planes which roar by, very low, sending the horses skittering.

On the day Duna and Wendy arrive back with a story of paradise found in a doorless, disused long-drop upon which they found relief looking out over a wide sprawl of countryside, I realise Mother Nature's almost indecent flaunting of her beauty borders on the absurd.

And there is plenty of absurdity to ponder. If my strange gait is painful, others are worse off.

Jo fell victim to injury before the trek even began. She fell asleep on the bus to the starting point at Rawene, woke with a start, and kicked into the seat in front of her.

They removed her toenail up at Rawene Hospital.

There is the man bitten on the leg by Billy Black's trained kunekune pig called Don Rash after the pig takes umbrage at the man's left-over porridge. Bikers take flying leaps over handlebars. A man from down country gets kicked in the knee.

The most dramatic is the rescue of Ray the vet, who comes off his horse in the backblocks of a farm and gets back on, only to start swelling up in dramatic fashion.

There is a gallop for help, and a return trip by medic Fiona, who abandons her 4WD halfway up a hill and puts on a performance worthy of the Man From Snowy River by leaping on a horse with her kit to gallop back down to Ray.

A rescue helicopter ride later, Ray ends up in hospital with various broken, punctured and ruptured bits.

I am guarded from serious injury by Lyn and Eileen - the riders who adopted me on the first day - and their cohorts, a group of women with salty senses of humour, largely from the Happy Hackers group from Northland.

Among them is Heather Jones, a farmer from Awanui, whose husband was All Black legend Peter Jones ... legendary partly because he was the first person to say "buggered" on public broadcasting.

Heather shares her horse truck - kitted out with bunks, kettle, a fridge and toilet arrangements which must not be discussed - with Lyn Wheeler, spry and tough as a nut, who rides in short shorts with chaps below.

With them are Wendy, Eileen and husband Rod, and Jenny, the youngest and still in her 40s, whom the others dub the catergiver.

Duna, 66, rides with a sprig of manuka flower in her hat, and talks about the colours on dragonfly wings, the bitterns breeding near her farmlet and developers swallowing up good tracts of riding land.

Some people find it odd that she's still riding, she says, but if the Queen of England can do it, then so can Duna of Kerikeri Inlet.

The group did the first leg of the trek from Cape Reinga to Hokianga last year and the aim of all is to reach Bluff in a decade or so. By then, Heather will be about 80. Duna won't be far behind, at 76.

They discuss this at the end of one day, sitting on the truck ramp with bourbon and cokes.

Heather hoots at the image of them all with zimmer frames attached to the saddles.

"By then, Steve will feel like he's running a mobile rest home."

Sometimes I ride alone and sometimes I ride with others.

The trekkers are a hotch-potch of humanity, ranging from 11 to 80 years old, from walkers training for a Spanish pilgrimage, to Marcelo from the United States who has a habit of swimming naked which puts Jenny into quite a tizz.

There is the young family from Britain, and there is Charlie Dunne, a local who has hired out his nuggety bush horses for the trek, and who one night bemoans the state of a world in which "the ladies always call their horses darling, but never call us darling".

On the trail, I hear the love story of Richard and Emily Fladgate who met in 1989 when Richard got a job schooling hunting horses in Emily's hometown of Virginia in the US. "I was the farm boy who used to ride horses mustering. She was the poncy showhunter. I'd turn up barefoot to train the horses. Grab the mane and hang on was the motto. We would team up for riding dates."

I hear the love story of Ray Hooper and Toss Woollaston after Ray's daughter, architecture student Haley, tells me her father returned home from the 2006 trek with "sparkles all over himself". Having not ridden for 30 years, since he was a child on a farm, he soon formed a bond with Toss Woollaston, an elegant Hanoverian thoroughbred-cross.

Stories like these make the trek pass quickly. Approximately 10 minutes after Felix starts hollering each day, we see the campsite. From afar it looks like a circus, the big blue and white marquee with its spires and the scattered rainbow of Hobbit-like mounded tents around it.

The travelling village comes complete with medics, hot showers, flushing toilets, mobile bar and massage tents staffed by a Waiheke Island massage business.

There are blacksmiths and vets and wranglers. There are cycle experts and, most important of all, there are the catering trucks which managed to churn out Mediterranean salads, cooked breakfasts and pork roasts with perfect crackling for 250 people sitting in a cow-pat-strewn paddock in the middle of nowhere.

Sometimes the outside world does come in.

At Kai Iwi Lakes, it comes in the form of Ray Woolf, who brings his chihuahua and sings in the marquee, hips swivelling like a younger man while the trekkers dance about in front of him, hollering along to the words.

It also comes as Ernie the Kumara Man from Dargaville, the Kumara Capital of New Zealand, who speaks - with some passion - about the ancient mysteries of the kumara. He tells us of red ones, gold ones, and a new one which he said he couldn't tell us about yet, so secret was its existence.

Later, there comes the Singing Cow Cocky, whose family farm we ride over. He sings some of the best Elvis covers I've heard and there is some regret when he leaves the building.

The trekkers go on autopilot as the days settle into a routine. Wake, eat, take tent down, find horse, ride, put tent up, annoy the helpers, eat, sleep. I become addicted to instant coffee.

When I ride alone, I look at Felix's ears and sometimes discover I'm not thinking about anything at all.

"Leave only hoofprints" is the ethos of the trek. I somehow leave sunblock, Felix's lead rope, a raincoat, innumerable tent pegs, a fork, sunglasses, a hat and miscellaneous items of food at various strategic points along the way. Someone else leaves their underwear, which festoons the centre pole of the marquee on the last night, flapping happily in the breeze flowing up the Kaipara Harbour.

I spend the last day with Trish from Ruawai. Courtesy of lunchtime apples, Felix and I are old mates and I discover he can neck-rein, giving me hours of fun using the reins as a joystick to make him veer from one side of the trail to the other.

We canter, laughing, through waters sparkling in the sun and along shade-dappled forest paths. At the very end, the trail dips into a strand of flowering manuka, the smell redolent of childhood holidays in Northland.

I sit that night watching the sunset on the glorious west coast, and I quaff an ale.

I get in touch with a few after the trek. Steve is busy promoting it for next year. Jenny has moved from massaging knees to massaging wrists at the winery she works in.

I visit Wendy's house near Whangarei and arrive to find her two horses in the front yard to save her the bother of mowing.

I watch An Unauthorised History of New Zealand the next week and they screen the footage of Peter Jones, husband of Heather, saying he was "buggered" after an All Blacks match. I think how well matched they are.

One day there's a package in the mail with a horseshoe in it. It's one of those Felix wore on the trek.

Further information: See greatnewzealandtrek.com.