Hello again!
Thank you for joining me for the second instalment of my Journey around New Zealand. If you didn't catch the first volume then please do check it out!
We both woke from our first night in the tent. I remember feeling sore, a little culture shocked but so excited for what the day had in store for us. I woke up just as dawn was breaking. Looking around, I felt lucky to be alive.
We had a breakfast of porridge and fruit, which is the ideal cycling meal by the way! and got off early for our second day on the road. I remember having this track playing through a portable speaker in the morning. Myself and Lewys were dancing around like idiots whilst putting the tent down. It was moments like those which kept morale up and kept us going.
As we were edging closer to the Coromandel peninsula, the hills grew larger and the roads more winding.
The feint mountain range in the distance was the Coromandel and the body of water in front of it was the Firth of Thames.
We just had to get around towards Thames and find a place to stay for the night...
I was in this area that the magnificence of the New Zealand road began to present itself. The way the road winds and follows the contours of the country. There is something truly magical about not knowing what is around the next corner and in this country, it could literally be anything. From a vast mountain range to beautiful blue seas. The feeling of being blissfully lost in a beautiful place is something I have chased my entire life. This is something that occurred regularly in New Zealand and is a theme that will run throughout this series.
Crossing to the Coromandel Peninsula
You can get an idea of how big our tent was! its the big green tube on the back of my bike...all 8KG of it.
The weight of the packs on our bikes proved to be a bit of an issue throughout the trip. They created so much aerodynamic drag in headwinds and weighed about 30KG in total. That's a lot of weight to lug up any hill, let alone the monstrous mountains of the South Island!
But more on that later...
It was just outside of Thames that the weight of our packs really became an issue, when Lewys's rack physically snapped!
It was really lucky that this happened just outside the town as there were plenty of bike shops we could buy a new one from. That was another $120 down the drain!
We stopped up in Thames for a spot of lunch. You can see from the photo that we had a lot of stuff between us!
We used our time in the town to get some food for the evening. We really had to think ahead like that as we didn't know where our next home for the night would be and we couldn't just 'nip out in car' to the shop. It was a real shock to system as we were so used to a convenient way of living and suddenly dropped in this journey that was distinctly inconvenient!
We cycled for another 40km before reaching a campsite. This route took us a long a really narrow coast road with no barrier and a 12 foot drop into the sea! This was especially nerve racking when cars were passing us but it was great for our morale as we were really looking out for each other during this time. It was challenging riding and the coastal wind was really against us.
We were getting exhausted and very hungry, a killer combination! I remember finally rolling into the campsite and being so exhausted that I just fell off my bike and I was too weak to pick it up. Lewys was in the same state and we knew we just had to get the food out and cook it, quick! Neither of us could remember where we had put the food, so we were tearing everything off the bikes in desperation to find it. By the time we started cooking some noodles up, all of our stuff was strewn in a 15 foot radius of us. We were so hungry that we had no regard for any of our stuff - I would've loved to have been a fly on the wall when that was happening just for the sheer ridiculousness of it!
After eating and putting the tent up under a huge tree, we were rewarded by another beautiful sunset.
We put some music on, had a couple of beers and cooked up a big meal in the tent.
I kept telling Lewys that smoking would only slow him down, but he wasn't interested...Each to their own I guess!
I slept so well that night, but had a bit of rude awakening the next morning...
My instant assumption went to a Tsunami or Earthquake siren and I felt pretty scared in that moment. It eventually stopped and I asked around the campsite. Turns out the siren was to call the voluntary fire service in the event of an emergency. New Zealand doesn't tend to have full time emergency services in it's rural areas and it's easier to set off the siren rather than contacting volunteers individually.
It was around 10km down the road the next day that we saw exactly why the service had been called out.
Luckily, all those involved escaped with their lives intact. Regardless, it was a stark reminder of the danger of the roads.
The picture gives you an indication to the kinds of roads we were up against. Throw in careless drivers (and lots of them) and we had a pretty tense few days riding along this peninsula.
That's it for now, but please do check back in for the next instalment of this series in the next week or so!
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Jack :)
