Bounce Box Battle

If you hike the Te Araroa and you get to the South Island, you have two options for some of the stretches: get to town for resupply or send yourself a so called bounce box to some of the very remote places hikers come through.

And if I say remote, I mean it. In size New Zealand is only slightly smaller than Germany but the total population is only 1,3 million more people than my hometown Berlin.

For the South Island are a few established bounce box places. One of them being Arthur’s Pass that comes after a very long stretch through the mountains, at least 9 days without a chance of resupply. And quite often the moment you will need a new pair of shoes. This applies whether you walk SoBo or NoBo, though for NoBo the gruesome stretch is ahead of you.

In the small village is a NZ post agent who receives the boxes which then are being collected by the owner of the Youth Hostel, where you can pick yours up, in theory…1000 boxes or more will arrive during hiking season. Just the postage on them is a nice little sidekick for the NZ Postal Service.

During my research how to resupply I came across a company called TA Supply and they offer a range of things that they will post for you. Pretty amazing service, especially if you are from abroad. My contact with them was just pleasant and amazing the whole time. More about it in a minute.

If you are German you will understand the word Maschendrahtzaun, basically a synonym for Nachbarschaftsstreit (quarrel between neighbours over nothing) which not seldomly ends before court.

At some stage when I was in Nelson I quickly wanted to check whether the package had yet arrived. Same as in Germany you get a number that shows the status of your parcel online. On the 12th it was marked as “delayed” I was not worried too much as I planed to arrive at Arthur’s pass on the 21st. But with the date coming closer my parcel was not moving anywhere….I tried to find out more on the NZ postal service website but nothing was to be found. Finally I contacted Allen from TA Supply whether he had an idea what I could do/ what is going on.

After a couple of hours he got back to me with the most hilarious story:

The owner of the YH and the post agent were in a fight over a supposedly lost key (which is probably only the surface of something that runs much deeper). Anyway, the boxes started accumulating in the locked post shed and no one had excess. At least not Thursday thru Sunday. So quite a few hikers, who spent a lot of money buying and sending resupply items ended up empty handed. NZ Post did not reply to questions how to solve the problem and finally the YH owner went to the police. Here a link to one of the articles about the story, that hit the news.

It seems that she will now get access but my parcel very likely was never delivered there and there is no return to sender option online.

Now back to TA Supply. Allen has been amazing all the way long! He even refunded me the money I paid, which I feel really bad about, because it isn’t his fault.

As for my resupply, I was able to get that sorted differently and will be hiking from Arthur’s Pass beginning 23rd through Christmas. The box you may ask? Not sure yet, I tried a re-direct to the end of the next section. But it might be really tight and has not yet been confirmed. Who knows perhaps there is an X-Mas miracle somewhere along the way.

Happy Hollidays!