2dot3 - Going downhill fast

…and savage my helmet.

Now some of you may be shocked that I would deliberately dismember a piece of safety equipment, but think about it – carving a few millimetres of polystyrene to produce a shape custom-moulded to my head has got to be better than something which is going to focus any impact on a point previously weakened. Plus an impact is far more likely if I’m distracted by painful headgear. The only other alternative was to spend a large part of my holiday searching for a bike shop big enough to stock an extensive range of helmets, and I know from experience I’d still end up having to doctor one. So I carved up my rental helmet, which is probably a second illegal activity for the day, but I’ll just buy it off them.

In the morning continue Due South. I decide to detour via Palmerston North, a place John Cleese described thus:

If you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to, I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick

But fortunately I know someone who went to University here and she can tell me what’s good to do:

“Nothing”

So I only stick around long enough to discover they have the most incredibly nice Burger King, in the world, ever!

There’s nowhere left to go but Wellington, and since the aim is to get there on the way up on a weekend, it seems wrong to go there now. The thought of catching a ferry that day creeps into my head, and before you can say “stupid bloody idea” I’m in a headlong dash down to Wellington, concocting numerous justifications:

…if there’s a 3 o’clock ferry, I could get across to the South Island, get to a campsite and be sitting with my feet up a day early!

…the weather’s nice. If I wait a day it might be horrible!

But wait! This is silly, I have the technology, I can just pull over and check. So I pull over, turn my phone into a wifi hotspot and whip out my macbook. Modern day camping eh? Gotta love… What? No signal!? But it was there a minute ago!!

So I try on my phone, and learn there’s no 3 o’clock journey, and my phone tells me I can’t book on a ferry for 3 days!! What the hell?

I’ll just get to the local Top 10 campsite, use their wifi and stay the night.

But my phone can’t even get a signal to ring the campsite and book, so I bang the address into my GPS.

“Number 95 does not exist, use 103?”

Yes, whatever!!!!

But when I get there I see the problem. The road starts at 103! Several minutes of head scratching and three point turns later, not easy in a long wheelbased campervan, I discover that the other half of the road lies on the other side of the river, and requires a half-mile backtrack to get round!

Some days eh?

But the campsite’s really nice. It’s in “Lower Hutt”. The town is right across the bay from Wellington and has a bit of a beach. Not much to lie on, but good to run on, and only a couple of km from the campsite, so I get to use my bike again, and my nicely fitting custom helmet. And I get the boat booked for the morning.

I finally have a camping interaction. My camping neighbours Tony and Trish are from somewhere near Vancouver, towards Kamloops, so I probably drove past it last time. They’re in their 60s or so, and met because both their previous partners were suffering from the same kind of brain tumour. But that’s far too poignant, moving and downright real for this blog.

Terry’s son has shot some videos for Australian TV explaining scientific concepts to laymen, which is apparently very successful. (Google “Veritasium”)

By heck it’s a cold night. Britz provided me with a duvet, but it’s no match for the cold night here so I have to keep the van’s internal 240V heater blasting all night. In the morning there’s a line of vans with frost on their windscreens, except mine which is suspiciously clear!

I’m up early for my ferry, but I needn’t have worried as the ferry is an hour late. Well, the sun is shining out of a clear blue sky and I have a comfy van with a loo to use while I’m sitting on the dock of the bay, and this means I can finally read the guidebook I’ve carted halfway round the world!

In fact I get so caught up in planning that I’m actually annoyed when the ferry is finally ready! Boarding is fun though, the traffic is segregated, then carefully filtered onto the boat, to fit the right size and shape vehicles in every available nook and cranny on the deck. I haven’t seen such clinical procedure in loading a boat since I was hanging out with Noah and it started raining.

With my home tightly squeezed into a spot I went upstairs to get my full cooked breakfast:

“We’re not doing breakfast on this voyage, sir”

“But, you said you were?!”

“Yes, but now we are an hour late it’s too late for breakfast”

“L”

So I got a crappy Lasagne, but soon cheered up when I found “The Cove”. For 30 bucks extra you get access to an executive lounge that seats only 8 people. Oh, and you get 5 bucks worth of wifi, and 15 of vouchers for onboard spending, making it good value for a bit of seclusion in my book. However, I did wonder if I would have more fun remaining in the public bit and finding someone to talk to.

But even that was available in the Cove. The only other person there was a young lady who turned out to be named Janelle, and was driving a Ute from Auckland to Christchurch for her company’s use.

It’s a 3 hour 20 minute journey across the Cook strait, but the time flew by as we talked about New Zealand, Christchurch, Life after the Earthquakes, Metallica and all that, and I pretty much missed all the views. Ah well, I’m coming back this way.

And so, I found myself in Picton, the gateway to the South. It’s a very pretty seaside town, and I know exactly what to do next – acquire a sleeping bag.

Done. Now what?

“Er… oh look there’s a Scottish pub! You see loads of Irish pubs, but a Scottish one? I’ll get some grub at the “Flying Haggis” and figure out where to go.”

If the bangers and mash is anything to go by, I know why you never see a Scottish pub!

But at least I have a plan. Head for Nelson.

The road out of Picton is called the Queen Charlotte Drive, and what a road it is!! It clings to the cliff edges and climbs, swirls and dances back and forth above bays and coves for mile after mile. There’s plenty of gorgeous views out to sea, and down to the shore, or across to the harbor, but little time to look at them as the road heaves itself into the next sequence of hairpins.

Oh to have a nimble sports car to dance between the curves, scamper over the rises and falls, skip daintily from one crest to the next…

But my huge van brings its own entertainment. Working the gearbox to keep up momentum, following the racing line to reduce the swing on the corners.... or  as Waylon Jennings would put it: Straightening the curves. Flattening the hills.

For the next two hours my jaw didn’t leave the floor. What a drive! What an island!! The North island had been underwhelming but this was overwhelming. Every bend brought new scenery to gawp at. I should be taking pictures, but when?

Now?

Now?

What about now?

You could stop every 10 metres and capture a stunning image. But I’m in the zone. Paul Oakenfold’s Goa mix on the stereo and nobody on the road. Heaven.

Eventually I reach Nelson, and barrel on through to Richmond, where the Nelson Holiday camp is(?). I’m tired, but it’s right in town so I don’t want to waste the opportunity to walk to the pub, the receptionist points me at four. They’re all empty.

Wednesday.

No, Thursday.

…Friday?

Up early and North towards Abel Tasman National Park, renowned for its golden beaches, sculptured granite cliffs, and its world-famous coast track. Except I’m going to the less famous Kaiteriteri Mountain Bike Track. Yeah sure if I had someone to talk to I might spend all day hiking along a coastal track, but on my own? No chance!

But bombing round a forest? That’s more like it!

The car park is like a scene from a movie. One of those “beware of American yokels” flicks. It’s actually a clearing in the forest with line after line of empty caravans, and my campervan. I have the track to myself. I take a quick picture of the map: lots of squiggly lines with odd names, and I set-off up “Half pipe”.

Holy cow it’s steep!

Yes, any rise is a shock after 9 months in Amsterdam, but this is ridiculous. I stand up to get some strength into the pedals, and the back tyre spins up. I lean back to get some weight on it and the front wheel lifts off the ground!

“Aarrggh! So this is what all those gears are for!”

The hairpins are incredible, practically vertical. It’s a test of will to carry enough speed to get round, knowing that if I go wrong I’ll plunge off the cliff. By the time I reach the top of “Half pipe” I’m panting like a dog, and grinning like an idiot.

Next is “Sidewinder” a less mental version of “Half pipe” and I can make it round the hairpins. Then comes “swamp monster” and the track finally levels out for a bit, and I start to feel like I’m getting the hang of this.

There was no indication of distances on the map, so I’ve no idea how long the loop I’ve chosen will take. It’s another glorious day and the sun is peaking through the trees, trying to fry me. I emerge into a clearing by a gate and am thankful there’s a water fountain for idiots who don’t bring water with them (oops!) and plunge on into “Glade Runner” and along “Revelation”.

The tracks are graded for difficulty, and apart from “Half Pipe” I’ve ridden the easy tracks so far, but to complete the loop I need to continue on the intermediate stuff, and that means mounting “Ziggy” and ascending “Big Airs”.

Well, crikey what a climb. My lungs are bursting, my legs are burning, I’m wishing I’d brought food, when the unthinkable happens…

I run out of gears!

Fortunately I’m only yards from the summit and there’s nobody to see me quit and walk.

The ascent had come close to killing me, but the descent was definitely going to finish me off. The track becomes ridiculously narrow. There’s barely half a bike’s width between the track below and the cliff on my right, but if I lean left there’s a plummet that looks like a hundred foot drop through bushes and trees.

This is fantastic!

No intelligence-insulting safety briefings, no plodding along between grannies and kids on an “Adrenaline-fuelled fun ride”. This is where it’s at: surviving on your wits, living on your reactions… if I make a mistake there’s nobody to help. And if I fall into a ravine all alone, and have to hack off a limb to survive, I can write a book about it (slowly).

But I don’t. I eventually make it round in one piece, with two thoughts:

If I lived near here I’d be a Mountain Biker for life.

It wouldn’t be for very long.

Back to my van and “Wahoo!” I can have a nice hot shower here in the scary caravan field.

Southbound and down, loaded up and truckin’.

I stop at Murchison, home of New Zealand’s longest “swing bridge”. Think Indiana Jones, only with fewer scimitar-wielding natives.

S’alright.

I wind up at Carter’s Beach, near Westport, and it’s a great campsite, right by the beach. My neighbours are from Newcastle. Not the “Why aye man” one, the one near Sydney. They started in Christchurch and are doing the loop anti-clockwise, same as me.

“Most people go the other way round” says Jenni.

“Really, how do you know?” I ask.

“Because we see more people going the other way”

“Er, right”

They point me at the local pub for some grub, I get a friendly hello, some ok food and a welcome beer.

But the best thing about staying here is the beach. I don’t know which was more incredible, the glorious sunset, the wondrous star filled night sky, or my dawn run along the sand, but I know it was an incredible first two days on the South Island.