Archive for April, 2009

492km Raetihi to Te Kouma

For most cyclists, New Zealand ends at Bluff, the little township at the bottom end of the South Island that faces out to the ocean and the icy world of Antarctica. But for us, New Zealand finished on the Coromandel Peninsula, in the tranquil sheltered bay of Te Kouma.

We arrived there on a sunny autumn afternoon, the culmination of 11 days cycling from Wellington through gorges, over high plateaus and around vast lakes. Like most of our farewells to a country, this one brought a strange mixture of jubilation and sadness. We celebrated completing another country with fresh oysters from a seaside shop (divine with a dusting of freshly ground black pepper and a sprinkling of chilli sauce) and then settled down in a park to ponder the next step: San Francisco and a summer in North America.

The next few months will bring some of the world’s most soulful scenery our way, from Rocky Mountain highs to lonely prairie plains and all the while we’ll be getting steadily closer to home. In a way, we’ve been edging slowly homeward from the day we stepped our our front doors. The whole time we’ve worked our way further and further east, knowing that inevitably we’d return to where we took our first pedal strokes, just outside Montreal, and to where we grew up, in the Maritime provinces. But it was hard to imagine this while we walked through the souks of the Middle East, camped out with nomads in Central Asia or cycled through remote villages in Laos. (more…)

291km Picton to Raetihi

It’s a cloudy morning when we reluctantly make the decision to leave the South Island. With only a month left in New Zealand, it’s time to head north. First though, we collect one last South Island treat – fresh mussels straight from the fish plant. A 1kg bag of the tasty molluscs costs just $1.50 so we pack them into Friedel’s back bag and hope they’ll make the trip to Wellington unscathed.

With fresh seafood in tow, we roll down to the ferry terminal, buy a ticket and follow some fading blue lines on the pavement to a spot in the car park where cyclists are supposed to wait. We’re surrounded by ferry workers, who are taking turns putting train carriages into the boat and driving a lot of new cars on board. They’re doing this in reverse and at high speed. “Has there ever been an accident?” we ask. “Oh yeah. Once we crushed an entire truck with a train,” one fellow says proudly. We stand back and let them do their work without any further distractions.

When we roll off the ferry on the other side, it’s clear we are not going to cycle out of the Kiwi capital. There’s traffic flying everywhere on roads that simply aren’t designed with cyclists in mind and we aren’t in any mood to take risks after a German tourer died on New Zealand’s roads a few weeks ago. Stephan had been on the road for 3 years and when he was hit by a logging truck. We didn’t know Stephan but we had several friends in common and it’s a bit too close to home.

Instead, it’s off to the train station for us and thankfully Wellington’s trains are significantly more cyclist-friendly than the roads. The tickets are a snip and the bikes go into a luggage compartment free. The guard even helps unload our bikes when we descend in the seaside settlement of Plimmerton. We’ve come here for the Moana Lodge – a friendly backpackers so close to the beach that the waves sing you to sleep. “Sometimes the guests complain the waves are too loud,” says the owner later in the kitchen, as he tells us all about the ups and downs of running a hostel. (more…)