by Josie Dew
On I went past Gulch Road and Needles Point (ah, nearly home!) and Mirza (oh, maybe not). The road then hit the coast. Although the wind was still blowing like billy-o, the spectacular sight of big seas and high mountains that pressed in close to the coast fired my energy levels and I thought I’d push on down the coast for another three or more hours. This idea soon went to pot when, in the middle of nowhere, I came across a sign in the shape of a large bicycle saying ‘Pedaller’s Rest Cycle Stop’ and pointing down a long gravel road that headed up a valley towards a nest of mountains. I clunked down over the single-track railway and up the jolty dirt track that my map told me was Ure Road – a dead-end road that wove its way deeper into the valley alongside Waima (‘ask your mother’) River to a pretty non-existent-looking place called Kilgram. On the southern edge of Kilgram rose Isolated Hill overlooking Headache Stream.
But well before this place of neuralgic remoteness, I came across an old farmhouse set amid a beautiful garden and trees, one of which was a cabbage tree. Trying to steady themselves with a loud flapping of wings while clambering about upon this tree’s peculiar yucca-like leaves in search of its yellow-white flowers perched a couple of stout New Zealand pigeons. These were much bigger and plumper birds than the common vermin-spreading pigeons I’m used to at home. The New Zealand versions have a fine plumage sparkling with a green and purple sheen above a large pristeen white apron. Unlike their Trafalgar Square brethren, these two were quite shy and soon took off with heavy, thumping wingbeats.
The farmhouse belonged to Jim and Denise Rudd, sheep farmers who farmed an area that stretched into the hills as far as the eye could see. In other words a blinking long way. Farms round here aren’t small patchworks of dainty fields. They are whole huge swathes of wilderness, enormous hills and mountains that appear to cover an area the size of Wales. Down here, the average farm is nearly a dozen times the size of those back home.
In a field behind the farmhouse stood a sturdy little stone building. This was the bunkhouse – site of the Pedaller’s Rest complete with five-star view. Denise said I could either camp or have a bunk, but as I’d slept in my tent every night since leaving Auckland (fifty-three nights to be precise – not that I’m counting) and as I prefer being outside to inside, I erected my Tadpole with tent door overlooking the boundless expanse of sun-crested hills.
Denise told me that visitors to the bunkhouse came and went. Sometimes it was full of a busy mob of sweaty cyclists, other times days and days and days could go by with not a soul. She said that at present I was the only one staying tonight. No one had phoned up to book a bed. ‘So it looks like you’ve got the place to yourself. Enjoy!’
And enjoy it I did. With only the sound of the weird whooping birds and the wind whistling down the valley, the place was perfect.
I had just finished writing up my diary and was in the middle of a nice quiet read when suddenly all hell descended in the shape of six boisterous cyclists. Not all of them were travelling together. It was just by chance that they all arrived at the same time. First there was James, a good-looking, blond-haired, sun-tanned Kiwi, a teacher I think he said he was, from Auckland. Although he had a bike with him, he had walked the last few miles as he’d had a tyre blow out on him. I had a spare folding tyre with me that I would have gladly given him (I wasn’t after anything in return – no, really!); the only trouble was my tyre was a 26-incher and he was after a 700 c. So we discussed various tricks of the trade about how to patch up the sizeable split (gaffer tape, wad of hard packed grass, a taped patch of spare inner tube etc).
Then there were Dutch Marten and Karin who apparently knew me, though I not them. Karin immediately donated some surgical tape to James which she said was much stronger than gaffer tape. Both Karin and Marten worked in Marten’s family business – a bike shop, but had given up their jobs to cycle around the South Island for three months. They both had Gazelle frames and had built up the bikes themselves with what they thought were the best components for the job.
Next came the travelling threesome: Glaswegian Anne-Marie (a forty-year-old-looking fifty-year-old fitness instructor), Glaswegian Bridget (a twenty-six-year-old eco-architect-cum-Reiki Master) and Pete (a thirty-something plumber from Bacup, near Manchester). Bridget looked at me and said, ‘Josie Dew!’, which in her fetching Glaswegian accent came out as ‘Jer-zzie Duue’.
No one slept inside. Everyone whipped up a tent, the only two to share one being Mr and Mrs Marten. The area around the bunkhouse had turned into a sudden tent show. As I am particularly partial to tents I was now in my element and accordingly did the rounds, trying them out for size and investigating pockets and air-vents and materials and zips like a true tent anorak. Anne-Marie’s little 1½ kilo Vaude made up in weight what it lacked in size – it was like a glorified coffin with no space to entertain a friend or pile in a pack of panniers. Camping alongside me as she was, her Vaude made my abode look like a double-decker bus.
Bridget and Pete were both flying the flag with British-made Terra Nova Voyagers that were practically the same shape and style as my North Face Tadpole, just much better made. James had a big bright yellow dome that offered enough room to swing a sheep, but was not a practical colour if you wanted to sneak into the bushes and pass a night unseen. Not, that is, unless you could find a field full of dandelions or sunflowers to camp among. Marten and Karin also had a Vaude, only it was about ten times bigger than Anne-Marie’s with all sorts of interesting sections and doors. I think they even had an upstairs and a front garden in there too.
When it got dark, we went into the bunkhouse and lit a log fire in the little pot-belly stove. We were minus Bridget at this stage because she had disappeared off to the farmhouse to do a session of Reiki on Denise. Although they all knew each other at home and were currently all travelling together, Bridget, Pete and Anne-Marie had flown to New Zealand separately. Bridget was away for the longest – about a year. Pete had about a month and Anne-Marie six weeks. Pete never used to cycle. He was a keen footballer and from the age of fifteen would play every weekend religiously. Then, during one match, he was passing the ball to another player who made no effort to run for it whatsoever. Pete looked at this player and thought: what’s the point in playing football if the other player can’t be bothered? So he gave up football and played more squash until around 1987 when, becoming fixated with the Tour de France and Bernaud Hinault and Greg Lemond, he saw the light and took up cycling. He had since done the End-to-End (Land’s End to John o’ Groats) five times. On another occasion he embarked upon cycling across America and managed to get 1500 miles under his belt when he suddenly stopped in Oklahoma, about halfway across. ‘I kept getting to places and there would be nothing there. So I gave up and flew home. As soon as I got back I went straight up to Scotland and cycled around there instead. It was far more interesting!’
There seemed to be a little bit of friction between the threesome – at least between Bridget and Anne-Marie. Today, when they were cycling up the Weld Pass, Pete (who was also a triathlete) and Bridget (who was just naturally competitive) starting racing each other to the top, leaving Anne-Marie standing. Anne-Marie was not impressed; she didn’t see why everything should be a race and when she next saw Bridget she gave her a piece of her mind.
In the ‘Millennium Edition’ of the ‘Pedaller’s Rest Register’ I read a few comments from various pedallers who had pedalled this way in the past. A certain Nao Nishinaga from Sendai, Japan, obviously had one very large lop-sided leg because he called by here while travelling the coast on a micro scooter. A fellow countryman, Sosaku Kawagoe, at least was on a bike, but the weather was not being conducive:
Today I from Kaikoura. It was not so long but with head-wind. It was hard to cycling. I talked to myself ‘wind is friend, I am plaiing with the earth’. But … it was hard. Anyway, I made it. This hostel is lovery place. I’m happy here. But no shops nere here. This is bad or good?
A bit of a philosophical conundrum there, Sosaku. Though I w
ould say ‘good’ myself.
More philosophical musings came from MB Armstrong, Washington, USA, who noted, with an interesting use of capitals and tagged on statements of confusion: ‘The only Cure for Lonliness is Solitude – someone from Broadmoor.’
Dave Russell from Canada was a little more down to earth. ‘Pretty kick-ass place. A couple of crazy cunucks on tour give it the big thumbs up! Need a tailwind tomorrow. Please.’
When Bridget returned from her Reiki consignment complete with a brand new merino wool cycle jersey bought off Denise, she told me how four years ago she’d got some sort of agonising hereditary muscle-seizure disease and how for the past year she’d been living on a raw food diet. She also told me how a month before Christmas she’d had a bike built up for her ‘big trip’ (she was thinking of maybe trying to cycle home from New Zealand) and when she was standing at the side of the road with her bike at a junction, pausing to cross, a truck stopped at the junction, the driver apparently seeing her. But when he started up again he had obviously forgotten all about Bridget and drove right over her. She blacked out, broke a cheekbone, but somehow managed to survive. The bike was a complete right-off, though. Apart from the gear levers.
8
Kaikoura, Canterbury, 23 February
Although my Ortlieb panniers are waterproof, everything I have in my panniers is wrapped up in plastic bags (you can’t be too safe in this game with weather like the weather in New Zealand). This means that whenever I move about the insides of my tent or extract something from my panniers, I rustle like a trapped rat in a bag. Anne-Marie camped so close to me last night that my inner tent activities were severely inhibited; I didn’t want to wake her up from an excess of rampant rustlings.
This morning before breakfast Bridget sauntered off to a corner of a distant field to perform a dose of tae kwon do movements – an interesting-looking form of pushing-air-slowly martial art. Pete said in his deadpan northern accent, ‘She don’t half get some weird looks, yer know, like. I see people on campsites looking at her out the corners of their eyes!’
When Denise’s husband Jim stopped by the tents in his farm pick-up for a chat, he looked over at Bridget and said, ‘Is that girl all right?’ Jim had five lively farm dogs on the tray of his truck. He said that the job of the two English sheepdogs was to push the sheep, whereas the three brown specially bred New Zealand dogs pushed them back again.
Quite what the sheep were to make of this pushing, I don’t know.
I was the first off this morning. Although the forecast had been for rain there was no sign of it yet so I decided to sally forth south. The forecast had also said a strong southerly would blow, but instead I had a frisky northerly, which sent me shooting off along the coast through Wharanui (‘I’m fine wearing my shorts, thanks’) and past Willawa Point to Kekerengu (‘Japanese kangaroo’) where, despite the road continuing in exactly the same direction, the wind suddenly decided to run round from my tail and slam into me head-on. How very devilish of it. Still, no matter how hard the wind tried to push me packing off back to Picton, it couldn’t mar the enjoyment factor of cycling along this most spectacular of coasts that kept offering tantalising glimpses of the Seaward Kaikoura Range still mantled in snow. The road lay pinned between the high, eroded hills and mountains on the right and the wide, ruffled sea on the left. Between me and the waves, which crashed with a continuous swooshing crunch on to long and lonely shingle beaches, stretched the narrow railway. Only once did a train rattle past. A passenger train at that (one of only three services that run in the whole of the South Island) with an open viewing carriage where the passengers could get a taster of enthusiastic wind and bracing sea air. The rails ran so close to the road that had a passenger stretched out an arm, I could have shaken their hand.
Wild fennel and cabbage trees seem to do well round here. As do fords. Washdyke and Deadman Stream had a small trickle to them, but, during the spring melt, these dry beds would become raging torrents that would force traffic to use the adjacent one-lane bridges. I continued skirting the hem of the mountains and then, once over the shingle-braided Clarence River, the winding road was squeezed even tighter between the coves and bays of the rocky shore and the tall, steep cliffs. At times SH1’s wrap of tarmac balanced on a narrow ledge together with the railway – the tracks occasionally being swallowed by the black, gaping mouth of a tunnel.
Just south of Okiwi Bay (‘watery Chinese gooseberries’) and Waipapa (‘Ask your father!’) Bay and Paparoa (‘paternal oarsman’) Point, the rocks were covered with basking and frolicking and bellowing seals. This was Ohau (‘Oh how what?’) Point seal colony and proved a most amusing sight to be seen and heard. If you were travelling down this road on anything other than bike or foot (or in that Japanese man’s case, microscooter) you would miss most of the delights and antics of the seal cubs at play. There is the odd lay-by and designated viewing point for a vehicle to pause in, but it’s not quite the same as being out there with these sluggish and bawling great beasts, flopped out on the boulders like large whiskered slabs of putty with glistening squash-ball eyes.
At Rakautara I passed a fishing boat called Liquidator pulled up on to the shore and then I was upon CAY’S CRAYS and NIN’S BIN 4 COOKED – two roadside stalls selling freshly cooked crayfish (rock lobster). The Kaikoura coast is famous for its crayfish; the area was named by Tamatea, an ancient Maori chief, when he stopped by to eat some crayfish while pursuing his runaway wives (who were eventually transformed into greenstone in Westland). Tamatea was so impressed with the quality of the crayfish that he called the place kai (‘food’) koura (‘crayfish’).
A car and a motorhome were parked in the gravel lay-by, their occupants sitting at picnic tables sucking on some of Cay’s and Nin’s large pink-clawed legs and picking out the flesh. The car’s licence plate asked in text speak HW U DN, while the motorhome simply advised all to CUT LOOSE.
Blue Valley Duck Road came and went as did the Puhi Puhi River. Just on the outskirts of Kaikoura I saw a church with a big plastic noticeboard outside claiming that ‘JESUS DIED 4 U’. Seems the holy scriptures had turned to text talk to ram their message home.
I had just pulled up outside Kaikoura’s new New World supermarket when a woman with harum-scarum hair climbed into a fat SUV and promptly reversed into a slab of concrete that dislodged a part of her rear bumper. She drove off. I don’t think she was even aware of what she had done. That’s one of the advantages of driving an urban tank – you can crash into things, or even mow down a cyclist, and not even notice. Means you can still pick up the kids on time.
Kaikoura, Canterbury, 24 February
Last night I camped beside a stream complete with drifting ducks at 69 Beach Road Holiday Park – an immaculate site with a big shiny kitchen run by Katrina and Colin Legg. Colin told me he used to be a sheep farmer. ‘So I’ve gone from fleecing sheep to fleecing people!’ he said. Despite the site being on Beach Road, there was no beach to this site – just a huge valley view dominated by snow-topped mountains. I pointed my tent door down the valley as the wind had burnt itself out by now. But then as I watched the sun drop out of sight and the sky grow in colour, the pastures turned up their undersides in a sudden flap of breeze.
This morning that breeze is more like a small hurricane and is completely distorting the shape of some tents and flattening others. My neighbours hurriedly collapsed their tent and threw it into the back of their hire car. The woman is Glaswegian and is wearing one of those Action Man khaki-coloured sleeveless jerkins you see photographers wearing that contain about eighty-seven pockets. Her partner has long grey hair tied back in a ponytail. He had met his Action Woman when he was working in Glasgow at something highfalutin to do with tax. Then they downshifted and moved to the Isle of Wight where, because they loved collecting things, they owned the Blue Slipper Fossil Shop in Sandown. One day they thought they would do some exercise and cycled across the island to Cowes, where they had coffee and read the papers in a cafe. And then they c
ycled back again. ‘That was our training ride and after that we decided to shut the shop for a year and cycle around the world.’
So they had arrived in South Island with bikes and panniers and off they went with round-the-world tickets in their pockets. But they immediately hit hills and wind and rain. ‘We lasted four days – four days of hell! So we sold the bikes and panniers and hired this car. Travelling by car is far more enjoyable! Now whenever we pass a cyclist on the road we look at them and wonder how they do it!’
Kaikoura, 26 February
Even though I didn’t mean to be here, it seems I still am. But that’s one of the nice things about having no schedules to schedule myself into. Means I can come across a top spot like Kaikoura and lounge and linger without any pressing need to race and rush. Unlike the travelling threesome. I caught a quick sight of them the first night I arrived, stocking up on supplies at New World supermarket. The following morning I met Bridget as she was on her way to post a postcard before departing for Hanmer Springs with the other two. But she wasn’t very happy. Seems there was something of a rumpus going on between them all.