The best waterfalls in Hunua

There's something about Hunua that gets you almost the second you step onto the track. You're maybe forty-five minutes out of the city, past the last of the suburbs and into forest and farmland, and then you park up and the noise just switches off. Green light filtering down through the canopy, wet earth and leaves in the air, birds doing their thing overhead. If you've had a week of concrete and fluorescent lighting, this is about as fast as therapy gets.

It's also, unglamorously, one of the better workouts you'll get without a gym membership. The Cossey-Massey loop barely has a flat metre in it. It's stairs or slope, slope or stairs, the whole way round, and your heart rate goes up and stays up in a way that a treadmill facing a wall never quite manages, because there's always something new to look at instead of a countdown timer.

I've done this one twice now, once as the full loop and once on a shorter, lazier, cloudy-day version, and between the two visits I picked up a few things I wish someone had told me before I went the first time.