Maps
For a long time we were debating how we were going to navigate ourselves throughout New Zealand on the Te Araroa trail. There are a few ways of doing this:
1) You can buy all the maps you need. I have read that the 1:50,000 Topomap 260 series is best for tramping, and it covers New Zealand in 295 sheets. The 1:250,000 Topomap 262 series covers the counrty in 18 sheets, however, for tramping they lack the detail required and only really useful for us to get some scope of the trail ahead. Paper maps are expensive, to purchase every map for New Zealand would cost you about $3000. Going digital is an inexpensive way of obtaining a lot of TOPOs. A good place to get this is Map Toaster TOPO where you can buy all the maps for the country for just $199-$289. They are GPS compatible, have integrated aerial photography and has a road name and place search tool.
2) If you dont feel you want to buy any maps, you can get them all for free from the Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) website. They say "LINZ will provide digital files free of charge. Send us a portable hard drive and a list of the files you require, the format you require them in and a self-addressed postage paid return envelope...". You can also download them to your computer from the webiste.
3) Alternatively, and also what TastyTrek will be doing is this - An englishman named Simon 'Cookie' Cook has saved a lot of people, a lot of time. He has very nicely and impressively put together a whole set of 1:50,000 TOPOs (the ones freely available from the LINZ website) complete with the Te Araroa trail overlayed with handy notes to boot, and all in an easy to handle and print A4 size .gif files.
There are 103 maps altogether, so you can print off all of them on 52 sheets of A4 paper. We'll be doing this and binding them to make a small book. As we finish one to move to the next map, just rip it off and use it to light some fires :) For some sections that we feel we need actual maps, we'll probably be buying some TOPOs from time to time.
With this we'll also be taking a Garmin eTrex H GPS and some compasses.
There is one hump, in so far as, these maps dont have grid references. If we're carrying a GPS that gives us grid references, it may not be much use. We haven't quite figured how to remedy this bit yet, save cross checking Google Earth or LINZ'z maps with the trail maps and noting down grid refs on the map for the whole trail (which is too mammoth a task i feel). Still, we'll be taking the little GPS with us for better or worse.
Additionally, I read in a message that with these little Garmin eTrex H's, they dont natively support new New Zealand's Transverse Mercator map grid that’s been officially in use for a year now. But with entering some custom parameters available from the LINZ website it should all work fine.
Track Information
In addition to having all the maps printed off and bound, we thought it would also be quite useful to have all of the track information available to us as well. With all the track information that is available on the Te Araroa website, we will also be printing off a little book of track info. As we're taking a little netbook with us, we have put together an ordered collection of trail information, so that we may be able to view them off-line when on the trail. This will be put up available to everyone that wants it, as a file on our website soon.
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