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BIKE TOUR NZ: Kaikoura

2/24/2015

The view from Mt. Fyffe

Sunset from our beach

The morning after our bus arrived in Wellington we took the 3 hour ferry ride across the Cook Straight to the South Island to start the second half of our adventure. We arrived in Picton just after 1pm, and after a quick look around town we got on the road and headed down the coast. We spent our first night on the South Island camped in a bush on the side of the road just outside of Blenheim, but our second campsite was picture perfect right on the beach. We set up camp around 6, early enough to have a few hours of daylight left, and ate dinner on the black sand beach at sunset. The beach was covered in driftwood so we tried our hand at building a beach hut, which ended with me tripping on a stick and breaking my little toe, so Steve had to give me a piggy back ride back to the tent.

Despite the broken toe we made good progress the next day, and rode the last 65 of the 105 kilometers to Kaikoura in a little over 3 hours. The first half of the ride was right along the ocean and we made a few stops to watch the New Zealand fur seals and hike to a waterfall, then the road turned inland for a while with a backdrop of big beautiful mountains. Kaikoura is a cute little town on a peninsula overlooked by those same mountains and visited by seals, dolphins and whales. We worked out a deal with the holiday park, so we stayed for 4 days and cleaned rooms for a few hours a day in exchange for a free campsite and $15 an hour. We took a walk our first night and ran into Nate and Sara, friends from work in Skagway who are living and working in town for the season.

The weather over the weekend was a bit rainy so we spent most of our time just relaxing in the tent and eating the best fish and chips ever. On Monday the weather started clearing up, so in the afternoon we booked a tour with Seal Swim Kaikoura. They took us out to the seal colonies on a small boat and we snorkeled with the fur seals. A couple of them came quite close, and it was great to see them underwater, they're so much more graceful and agile than on land. We also wanted to swim with the dolphins, but it was so busy in town that they were booked solid, so we figured it would be better to try to do it when we come back on our way to Christchurch in a few months.

The range behind Mt. Fyffe

Tuesday morning dawned without a cloud in the sky, so we packed up and said goodbye to the holiday park and set our sites on Mt. Fyffe, the 1600 meter peak that overlooks the peninsula. We got the idea from Sara and Nate, who had done the hike a few days before we arrived, and they let us borrow a backpack so we could stay the night at the hut a few hundred meters below the summit. The hike was a very steep but well-groomed 4x4 track, and it only took us 3 hours to reach the hut where we enjoyed stir-fry chicken with vegetables for dinner and some good conversation with two girls from Germany, a woman from Christchurch and her son from Slovakia. We turned in early for the night and woke up at 4am to hike to the summit for the sunrise.

Sunrise from the summit

It was pitch black, and somehow both of our headlamps managed to die overnight, so we had to hike in the dark. The stars were just bright enough, and the trail was pretty wide and smooth so we didn't have too much trouble sticking to the trail. We made it to the summit at 530, just in time as the horizon was starting to turn pink by then. I've seen plenty of sunrises, but rarely have I been still to watch the whole thing. It was a grand show, the sky lightening slowly from East to West, the transition from pink to red to orange to light blue, and finally the sun racing over the horizon in less than a minute. The mountains behind us were beautiful as well as they were slowly illuminated by the dawn. The hike down the mountain was quite steep and even more tiring than the hike up, but we made it down by 11:30 and Nate picked us up so we would have time to make some progress on the bikes before the end of the day.

We got on the road around 2pm, and rode just a few hours to get a jump on the distance to Christchurch. We had been told the road was fairly flat from Kaikoura to Christchurch, a lie we've heard all too often and once again proved to be untrue. The first hour of riding was right along the ocean, flat and stunningly scenic, but the road soon turned inland and began climbing the big hills we had seen in the distance from the summit of Mt. Fyffe. After about 35k we reached a turnout at the bottom of one hill, and decided to save the next big climb for the morning and set up the tent for the night.

For more pictures check out the Photo post.

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Bike Tour NZ: Rere

2/8/2015

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Biscuit race!

Today we're traveling in style... I'm writing this post from an Intercity bus on the way to Wellington from Gisborne. This $60 bus ticket is going to save us 9 days of biking, and is helping us avoid a dangerously narrow road with heavy traffic... plus it has free WiFi! We've spent the last few weeks at a farmstay in Rere chasing sheep, and the last few days in Gisborne chasing waves, and now we're ready to head to the South Island and get our butts back on those bikes! We were told to spend 1/3 of our time on the North Island and 2/3 on the South, because somehow New Zealand gets even better than what we've already seen, so we'll be taking the ferry over as soon as possible so that we can have a few months to bike around before we have to interview for ski resort jobs in May.

Skurfing

In Rere we stayed with the Hickling family on their sheep and cattle station and had just as much fun working during the week as we did playing on the weekends. Our first weekend there they took us along to Wairoa to a waterski race where we spent more time on a boat in two days than I think I have my entire life. They were volunteering as one of the safety boats, so we got to watch the racing from front-row seats on the river, and we even got to participate in the womens race... Kerry drove, Jazz skied, I observed and Steve dressed up as our mascot! We also got to go out at the end of the day and try our hand at skurfing, getting towed behind the boat on a surfboard which we enjoyed even more than the wakeboarding we did in Taupo. On the second day of the event there was a biscuit race, and I made my racing debut hanging on to an innertube for dear life while we zoomed down the river into second place.

Thousands of sheep waiting for their haircuts

The next week on the farm they were shearing a couple thousand lambs, so we spent three days chasing the sheep from one pen to the other to help Grant and Jazz sort them, give them medicine and cut all the poop off their bums before they went for their haircuts. Sometimes the sheep cooperated, and sometimes they would do the exact opposite of what you wanted them to, but after some trial and error we both figured out the most efficient means of startling them into action. After a few long days of sheep startling we had a day off and ventured out on our bikes to the Rere rockslide, a long steep section of rock that acts as a natural waterslide. We borrowed a boogie board and spent the better part of the day sliding down on our bellies and skimming across the pool at the bottom. The weather wasn't particularly warm so we had the whole thing to ourselves! Our last few days on the farm we got to make use of our Alaska skills and split some wood, and we helped take down an old fence and put up a new one at the back of their property line.

Rere Rock Slide

We had such a good time with the Hicklings that both of us were a bit reluctant to leave, but we're also anxious to continue our adventure on the South Island, so Kerry gave us a ride into Gisborne where we spent the last few days exploring the town. Both of us have been wanting to learn to surf, so we celebrated our anniversary yesterday by taking a lesson from Surf with Frank. Our instructor Matt was from the Czech Republic, and is doing the working holiday scheme here just like we are so it was cool to compare experiences as foreigners in New Zealand. We had a lot of fun with Matt, and after a few tips on the beach he had us standing up on the boards in no time. We were just catching broken waves to get the feel for popping up on the board in the right stance, but now we've got something to practice along the coast on the South Island. We'll probably take another lesson after a few more practice sessions so we can learn to catch unbroken waves.

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Bike Tour NZ: The Motu Trail

2/2/2015

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The view from the Old Motu Rd

Soaking in the hot water stream

After skydiving and volcano hiking we spent another week in Taupo at a free camping spot called Reids Farm, right next to the Waikato river 3km outside of town. We explored town, went out to eat, and reconnected to the outside world at the library. We visited the Anarchy Boarding Park and took wakeboarding lessons, and the next day had a relaxing afternoon floating down the Waikato river on $6 pool toys with a stop off at a natural hot spring emptying into the river. On our last day in Taupo we rented a car and drove 2 hours West to Waitomo to the famous Black Water Rafting Company, and took a three hour excursion through a glow worm cave. They dressed us up in wetsuits, gave us some inner tubes and tools us down into Ruakuri cave where we climbed over rocks, jumped off of underground waterfalls and floated beneath a glowworm studded ceiling that looked like the night sky. So far Taupo is our favorite city on the North Island, and we were a bit reluctant to leave, but we had reached the 7 day camping limit at Reids Farm so it was time to move on.

We had spent a good deal of time at the library researching our route, and after hearing horror stories about big mountains, narrow roads and heavy traffic we decided to take a North Eastern route to Gisborne rather than go South through Napier. Despite having done very little distance on the bikes in the last several weeks we had a much easier time in the saddle than we expected. The weather was hot and the road was hilly, yet we managed our biggest day so far, riding 9 hours and racking up 135.6 kilometers, beating our previous distance record by almost 50k. We started by retracing our route back up the 5 past Reporoa before turning East onto the 38. There was a long steep climb out of Taupo and then rolling terrain after that. At Rotomahana we turned onto a back road that cut through to the 30, but turned onto a private logging road after a lady pulled over to suggest it. It was paved the entire way rather than gravel like the way we would have gone, and she said if security caught us to just say that we were lost. We almost made it, but a security truck pulled us over just 5k from the end of the road. He we friendly enough a let us continue on, and we popped out on the 34 just a few k before the junction with 30. We stopped at a dairy in Te Teko and each downed a whole liter of chocolate milk before continuing on until just after dark, when we came across a holiday park at a natural hot spring and decided to spend the night.

1000 kilometers and counting!

Our big ride the day before put just shy of the 1000 kilometer mark on Steve's odometer, so the next morning we reached that milestone a little over 30 minutes into our ride, shortly before we arrived in Whakatane at noon. We made it just in time for the end of their Sunday farmers market and picked up some veggies for dinner along with a bag of fresh cherries and two delicious tangelos. Leaving town there was a HUGE hill on the way to Ohope, and several more big climbs after that, and although we only covered 71k that day we both agreed it was more exhausting than the 135 the day before. We rolled through Opotiki in the evening just in time to buy some spam for dinner from a convenience store and found a spot to hide our tent in the bushes of a pull-out next to a beautiful beach before jumping in the ocean to cool down.

Jennies bike in front of the fountain of life.

From Opotiki we turned off the main highway and headed down the Moto Road Trail, a 67k cycleway that follows the historic coach road from Matawai to the coast, which was the first road between Gisbourne and the Bay of Plenty. It opened in 1915, and was originally only passable in the summer with the aid of planks and ropes to get the cars through. It was a beautifully scenic ride through gorges and over farmland, but the incredibly steep hills and rough gravel made it pretty slow going under the intense New Zealand sun. The description of the trail said it would only take 5 hours, but when we looked again we realized that we were going the opposite direction of the way most people ride and so would be going uphill pretty much the entire way, effectively doubling the time it would take. On the second big mountain we began running short of water and I was just starting to get worried when we came upon a little stream trickling down the side of the mountain, with a handwritten sign that said we could drink the water. We were so excited that we both drank ourselves sick and refilled every water bottle we had before we moved on. We spent the night close to the summit of the third big climb, clocking in at only 51k in almost 7 hours of riding.

Motu Falls

Our long uphill battle the day before paid off in the morning when we were able to start our day with a gentle ride along the ridgeline, with only a few more moderate climbs between us and a 3k stretch of downhill into the tiny farming community of Motu. As we came into town a man traveling down the road on a lawnmower pointed us in the direction of a community rowboat on a tiny pond, so we rowed out onto the water to eat our lunch before taking a 10k detour to visit Motu falls. From there it was an easy 14k on a flat, paved road to Matawai where we stopped to have a beer at their historic pub that is famous for its 2-headed sheep. We left town on the main road but soon turned onto another gravel road to head towards Rere Falls, and we set up our tent in a small turnout on the side of the road just as a big rainstorm rolled in.

The next morning we step off on our shortest ride of this leg of the trip, just 38k to the farm we were planning on staying at, but it seemed to take forever. A few more long uphill stretches in the morning and a long stretch of downhill just before we arrived, and a few surprises along the way. We had rain off and on as we got underway, and two rogue sheep led us down the road for several kilometers before a pair of bulls startled as we road by and jumped the fence into the road in front of us. We arrived at the farm just in time for lunch and then got to work helping around the farm. The current plan is to stay here in Rere for a little while and then head to Gisborne.

For more pictures from the Motu Trail check out the photo post.

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BIKE TOUR NZ: Kaikoura

Bike Tour NZ: Rere

Bike Tour NZ: The Motu Trail

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