Te Araroa Gear List

Of course we researched thorougly before buying the equipment we needed for our little adventure.

On previous trips and tramps we had mostly borrowed things from family and friends, so we decided it was finally time to buy our own equipment. That meant we had to get all the expensive things like tent, backpack and sleeping bag. But that also meant, we had the choice to buy them perfectly suited for what we have planned, instead of having to use equipment that might not be up to the task.

The first item we bought was our new Tent, the MSR Hubba Hubba NX. From there on, it just rolled. Every few weeks the mail would bring boxes containing some more items for our hike, and everytime we received a box we got even more excited.

Then we tried and tested everything we had on three test hikes on the Neckarsteig, Soonwaldsteig and Albsteig.

When we are done with the Te Araroa, we'll start reviewing the items and our gearlist, to show what we liked and what not, what we took that we didn't need or what we didn't take, but would have liked to have along the way.

We actually didn't change much throughout our hike, we were really happy with pretty much everything we'd taken with us.

Light my Fire Spork
Those didn't serve us very well - the first one broke within the first two weeks of our hike and we replaced both sporks with with the "Sea to Summit Alpha Light Long Spoon", since we weren't really happy with the really short standard sporks. And we never really needed a fork anyways, spoon and our pocket knife were usually enough.

Other than that we lost our Opinel pocket knife somewhere along the way and replaced it with pretty much exactly the same one.

The things we'd preferable left behind were most of our warmer clothes, but those of course we needed for safety reasons.

When deciding what to buy and what we need, we found a lot of really great blogs with great, thorough gear lists that helped us immensely. We stuck mostly to german blogs, as those was the gear we expected to be able to buy around here, too.
The ones we mostly used to compile our final gear are the ones listed below:

teararoanobo (Not just a list but rather a list of tips on how to plan your gear)

gustofrenzy

zuhauseimwald (German only)

explore-360-degrees (German only)

Techtest (German only, helped us a lot deciding in regards to charger + powerbank)