I just completed a ten-day, 330-mile bike tour of New Zealand with Backroads Touring Company. My original intention was to blog occasionally during the trip. The good news is that there was too much time on the bike and too much to see and do. So here I sit in the airline transit lounge collecting my thoughts and working hard to remember the best parts.
I’ve been wanting to do this trip for several years. I was one of the six percent of people (according to a tourist office survey) who said that the Lord of the Rings movies motivated me to want to see New Zealand. That, and a late-winter trip helps launch my century season. I was accompanied by eight other Americans – three couples and two women traveling solo. With our leaders Brad and Kevin, we were our own happy fellowship, all enjoying vacation, retirement, or a great gig as a New Zealand bike tour guide. Some of my companions were using this trip to train for their own athletic challenges – mostly marathons and triathlons.
I may have been among the slowest of the group, but I spent a lot of time taking pictures. In fact, I filled my camera card with eight hundred pictures. The best I will post online at webshots. (Readers, do let me know if this does not work!)
Much of New Zealand’s allure comes from its extensive undeveloped regions, some of which are completely undisturbed wilderness. We toured entirely on the South Island from Christchurch, making our way south along the West Coast, traversing the Southern Alps and ending in Queenstown. Much of this area is a temperate rain forest, sprinkled with a few, very small settlements that are separated by dozens of miles of heavy, primordial brush. The road through this region was not completed until the 1960s, and it was another several decades before it was paved.
Despite the fact that the voyage was coastal, you will see precious few pictures of the beach. West Coast beaches are uninhabitable due to the powerful undertow and the ever-present sand flies. These aggressive, biting insects made it difficult to even take pictures along the shore, swarming around any exposed skin and announcing their attachment with stinging bites.
Even though February is summer in New Zealand, this was a wool-and-Gore-Tex trip. We had hard rain for four of the nine days. Much of the rest of the time the landscape was shrouded in a grey mist. I found myself stopping any time the sun came out in order to gather some memorable pictures. And, near the end of our trip, we woke up to find the mountain peaks dusted with an early snowfall.
There was a lot on the balance sheet to counter the weather. The rain made everything green, including trunks of trees and road-side rock faces. The West Coast has little farmland, and there were long stretches when there was absolutely nothing. At several points we passed signs like, “Last Gas for 90 km”. The Kiwis themselves are wonderfully eccentric and care-free. In fact, you really have to remember that they expect you to look after yourself in these parts. I had to remind myself that this was, sometimes, a country with no guardrails.
And, the food! Lamb that melts in your mouth; delicious salmon; great-tasting beef, fish, cheeses and baked goods. We all bicycled hundreds of miles and gained weight. Every meal was a memory. Many of us, when asked, thought that the lunchtime visit to a salmon farm gave us the best meal of the week. Perhaps it was because we were chilled from the rainstorm, but the salmon chowder just hit the spot in such a way that we remembered for days.
