Walking 3000km for PNG women
Wellington: “It’s pretty trippy, eh,” said Finn Egan as he crested the hill to be smacked by the crisp southerly blowing in off Wellington’s South Coast.
For Mr Egan, 23, they were the final steps after two months of walking - some 1700km - from the northern tip of Cape Reinga to Island Bay, at the bottom of the North Island.
He’d scaled steep hills in downpours, traversed mountain tops, strolled along beaches and highway shoulders, scaled deep river gorges, wandered across rolling farmland, and fought through dense bush.
“Oh man I’ve seen everything,” he said on his final day on the North Island, winding through the narrow streets of Wellington, beneath the Beehive and round the waterfront to the wide pavement of Oriental Bay with its coffee, fountain, joggers and trucked-in sand. Mr Egan is just over halfway through the 3000km Te Araroa Trail, a tramp that traverses the length of Aotearoa’s two main islands. He’s doing it in an effort to raise awareness and money to help build a women’s refuge in Kokopo, Papua New Guinea.
It was there he spent about 18-months working as a volunteer at the local university’s teachers training college, an experience he said was incredible in a country that was “sweet,” but also “pretty buzzy.”
But it was there that he also learned of an endemic problem: its horrific rates of gender-based violence.
For all his efforts so far, he feels he’s done well for his cause. So far, he’s raised about $NZ5000 (about F$7113) through a Give-a-little page.