Felix is a movie star. Tom Cruise rode him in The Last Samurai and Felix had a body double and a makeup artist. He had professional Spanish horse trainers and can do tricks. He is used to better things.

Now Felix is lumped with me for a week as about 230 of us either ride, walk or bike our way through the back country from Rawene in the Hokianga to Pouto Point at the tip of the Kaipara Harbour.

Felix comes gratis of Steve Old, who was once horse co-ordinator for the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Last Samurai.

The Great New Zealand Trek - an ambitious plan to cover a segment of New Zealand every year over 10 years from Cape to Bluff - is his brainchild, born of a desire to open up the countryside to riders and to raise funds for multiple sclerosis, the disease which took his mother.

For this second stage of the trek there are about 120 horses and riders, 75 walkers and 35 mountain bikers, as well as an army of volunteers to move the campsite from place to place as we travel the 200km. The distance was, as Old puts it, five marathons in a row, and simple mathematics suggested four legs was far wiser than two. I never trusted mathematics.