Tell me and I will forget, show me and I will remember, involve me and I will understand.

One additional option for travellers when visiting Hokianga is the Footprints Experience, where you are led on a guided tour through the Waipoa forest at night with a local Maori guide. The tour is also listed as one of Lonely Planet's top “Code Green” Eco-tours in the world, so I didn't really feel like it was something I should miss.

Our guide, Koro, brought us through the forest and his stories blended scientific explanations of forest life with Maori legends. We approached Te Matua Ngahere just as the sun was setting. Te Matua Ngahere is the oldest living Kauri tree in the world. The forest vegetation is short in between the viewing platform and the tree, and so the light hits the trunk directly rather than through the regular canopy of leaves throughout the rest of the forest. This made Te Matua Ngahere seem illuminated and slightly ethereal. As we silently looked up at the tree in awe, a Morepork flew over our heads and landed in the branches of a tree closest to where we were standing. The Morepork (what an unfortunate name) is the only owl indigenous to New Zealand. Seeing the owl was the first sign of the approaching night as the bird is nocturnal.

We walked back to the trail head in the twilight, and when we arrived at Tane Mahuta, the largest Kauri tree in the world, it was dark. Tane Mahuta is Maori for “Lord of the Forest”, and is named after the god who successfully separated his parents who were locked in an eternal embrace. By separating his parents, he brought light to the world and life began. Once again, this is a badly summarized “Danielle verison” of the Maori creation story. I encourage you to read it for yourself.

As Koro shared these stories under Tane Mahuta, I was looking up to take in the whole tree. When Koro stopped talking to let his words sink in, we were engulfed in silence. You may remember just two weeks ago when I hiked up to the Sunrise Hut and was literally blown over by the force of the wind. The Waipoa forest is huge and full of leaves and branches ready to catch a breeze, but nothing was moving. Excuse me as I get a bit touchy-feely here, but the accentuated stillness of the forest compared to the intense juxtaposition of my last windy encounter with nature rooted me to my immediate surroundings and to the absolute present state of my being. My mind is constantly buzzing as to 'what will come next' – from my plans for tomorrow, a month from now, or even a year. I even dream about it. At that moment though, all of that fell away. Even though I was with 5 others, a silence as intense as the one we shared is hard to come by. In Edmonton, the noises from the city are always present. In the backpackers I have been frequenting for the past two months, there is always someone wandering around at any time of day. Even in the forest during the day, there is the crunching of the leaves underneath your feet, the calling of birds, and the sound of the wind in the trees.

But the Waipoa was in a state of absolute tranquil, unmoving stillness.

Koro broke the silence with a prayer to end our evening, but halfway through, he stopped himself and shouted “Kiwi!” For a full minute we listened to the call of a nearby endangered Kiwi bird before saying goodbye to the forest and each other to head back into the world.

“We are only said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”