Long Cloud Ride

by Josie Dew

  Kaikoura sits on a small rocky protrusion of limestone and siltstone that pokes out into the Pacific, overlooked by the mountainous upthrust of the Seaward Kaikoura Range, a spur of the Southern Alps. The Maori regard the area as a place of mythically historical significance as this was where the earliest Maori ancestors of the South Island tribes apparently arrived on the back of a huge whale. Also, the Kaikoura Peninsula was the foothold that the fearless warrior and demigod Maui used when he fished the North Island up from the depths of the sea. Unlike the European settlers who, observing that New Zealand was a country of two halves, stated the obvious by calling the more northerly island North Island and the more southerly one South Island, the Maori used a little more imagination. The North Island became known as Te Ika a Maui – The Fish of Maui (Wellington Harbour is the fish’s mouth, the Taranaki and East Coast protrusions are its fins, the Northland peninsula its tail). The South Island was named Te Waka o Maui – The Canoe of Maui, the one he was sitting in when he hauled up the North Island fish. But the canoe is apparently a stricken canoe (I’m not sure what it crashed into – maybe a cross-Channel ferry that took a wrong turning at Dieppe) with the crew on one side forming the mountains, and its shattered sunken prow in the north forming the Marlborough Sounds.

  The first Europeans to settle in Kaikoura were whalers. The waters just off the peninsula are unusually deep with a complex submarine canyon system forming a network of trenches and troughs where icy cold waters from Antarctica mix with warm waters from the north and east. All this creates an incredibly rich food chain for fish, marine mammals and seabirds. Swimming about in the krill-rich waters or moving about in the trench just off the continental shelf, barely half a mile from Kaikoura, live an abundance of squid (including the infamous giant squid of seafaring lore with eyes the size of cannon balls). Sperm whales, the largest toothed mammal on earth, are particularly partial to krill – and to squid. As a result sperm whales frequent the Kaikoura coast in greater numbers than anywhere else in the world. But where the whales were once exploited and hunted and harpooned and slaughtered in their thousands for the oil in their blubber, they are now protected and sought for an entirely different reason: ecotourism.

  Should the fancy take you, you can go on a whale-watching boat tour with WhaleWatch Kaikoura. Or you could take to the air with Wings over Whales or WhaleWatch Kaikoura Helicopters (how very eco) to try to catch an aerial view of a broaching whale – both sperm and pilot. And sometimes orcas. But it’s not just whales that draw the teeming tourists to Kaikoura. Also on the agenda to view or to swim or dive with are the particularly playful and acrobatic dusky dolphins, the bottle-nosed dolphins and Hector’s dolphins (the smallest and rarest and most threatened of dolphins). Then there are sharks to be viewed from an underwater cage (which is surely cheating), blue penguins and New Zealand fur seals, not to mention the largest number of pelagic bird species within such a small area of New Zealand coastline: shearwaters, gannets, terns, fulmars, petrels, royal and wandering albatross and mollymawks.

  As I’m not very good at joining tour groups to go in search of something surrounded by excitable people exclaiming excitable remarks, I gave all the plentiful tour outfits like Shark Dive Kaikoura, Seal Swim Kaikoura, NZ Sea Adventures, Kaikoura Executive Sea Tours, Dolphin Encounter, Ocean Wings Albatross Encounters, Life on the Reef, Graeme’s Seal Swim and Topspot Seal Swim a miss. Instead I went exploring on my bike and walking all over the peninsula, marvelling at the size of the bull kelp (monster tube-like intestines built like trees) that washes up on the beach around these rocky shores.

  Some who did go whale-watching and quad-bike sightseeing were Debs and Simon. I met Debs in the campsite reception and she looked at me as I was paying for my tent spot and said, ‘Have I read your book?’ This was a bit of a difficult question to answer because, as this was the first time I had ever met Debs in my life, I didn’t know how I was supposed to know whether I knew whether she had known whether she had read my book or not. As you can probably tell, when you spend so much time alone in the saddle, life can get immensely confusing. Especially when it comes to simple questions.

  Anyway, Debs was an affable soul and invited me back to warm my cockles (the nights have been decidedly chilly of late and it was now night) in her hired Pacific Horizon motorhome. The motorhome was the size of a small removal lorry and contained beds and bunks, lighting and heating, toilet and shower, cooker, fridge and microwave and a dining table the size of a tennis court. It was a long time since I had sat in a seat at a table and it was a most enjoyable experience – no tent-induced backache or dead-limb pins and needles.

  The other occupant of the Pacific Horizon was Simon, Debs’ boyfriend, or maybe even fiancé but I don’t think they had got quite that far quite so fast yet as they only met eighteen months ago on an organized End-to-End bike ride. Seems they took an immediate shine to each other. ‘We stuck together solidly almost to the exclusion of talking to anyone else on the tour!’ said Debs.

  Debs, by the way, lived in Putney and worked in the city. She used to be a lawyer but was now a high-flying banker. ‘What do bankers actually do?’ I asked. Debs looked at me as if I’ve spent too much time alone on my bike. Which I probably have. But that still didn’t answer the question. It’s like hedge fund managers and actuaries. Apart from actuaries dabbling with a few statistics and sums, and hedge fund managers dabbling with (presumably) roadside bushes full of hawthorn, field maple and dog rose, I have terrible difficulty grabbing a grasp of what it is they do to make such a pile of money. But before I could get any further down this road of cul-de-sac querying conundrums, Debs was telling me how she had been living a high-flying life all her working life and felt that now she had reached her mid-thirties it was time to do something else. ‘I’ve been picking up DoC leaflets since we’ve been in New Zealand,’ she said. ‘Maybe we’ll move here and I’ll work in conservation.’

  Simon, who was a website designer from the North-East (somewhere around Sunderland, I believe), was quite keen on this idea because he thought New Zealand was a good country to maybe start up a cycle-tour company. He wouldn’t do too much of the cycling, mind you. Just the organising. He and Debs had gone on a two-week cycle tour of Cuba a little while back. It was an enjoyable time, by all accounts, apart from the cycling (hard work) and the roughing-it part. ‘I like my comforts,’ said Simon. ‘I much prefer motorhomes to tents!’

  He and Debs were now away for a month because Debs was ‘in between jobs’. Banking jobs, that is. Whatever banking means. They both got on a treat. ‘We hardly ever argue,’ Debs said, ‘apart from when Simon’s reversing and I’m standing behind, seeing him back and apparently making all the wrong hand signals!’

  Debs’ mum lived on the Lincolnshire coast. She had recently split up with her husband after thirty-six years of marriage. ‘Which I think was thirty-four years too long,’ said Debs. So her mum left her dad for a man called Mike. ‘She didn’t tell Dad,’ said Debs, ‘she just left him a note to say that she had left. She also left lots of meals she had prepared in the freezer with little notes attached to them with instructions on how long to microwave them all for. There were notes everywhere. Even the washing machine had a note on it to say how it worked and which setting to use and how much powder to put in.’

  Debs’ mum met Mike on a beach in Lincolnshire when either he, or she, or both of them had been out collecting pieces of coal. As you do. Anyway, last year her mum and Mike had met up with her dad and they all spent Christmas together. ‘It went very well,’ said Debs. ‘Mum and Dad get on so much better now. Dad likes Mike and Mum is miles happier. So is Dad because he’s got his independence and is doing his own thing.’

  Headlines today: ‘WEATHER LASHES VEGGIE BUYERS’. As a result of the floods, people would be paying more than double for their greens because of a major shortage in vegetables. As of yesterday, the price of most vegetables increased by more than 200 per cent. Here’s a taster of the price hikes: a cauliflower up fr
om $1.60 to $4.30; spinach $3 a bunch, now $7; broccoli at around $1, now $4. ‘The shortage could last a further two months as growers struggle to clear their patches and renew their plants,’ says Vegfed chief executive Peter Silcock. Bananas are unaffected, so that’s a relief.

  And here’s the weather news: the New Zealand Herald warned me that ‘foul weather will thump New Zealand from both sides this weekend. From the west, a low will arrive, lashing the whole country tomorrow. The South Island and the lower North Island will be hit hardest, with strong winds and up to 150 mm of rain. Come Sunday and Monday’ (it is now Thursday) ‘the country will feel the effects of the remnants of tropical cyclone Ivy. Met Service weather ambassador Bob McDavitt said it looked like a “tempestuous” end to summer.’

  Another headline says: ‘Read and Weep. Come Saturday, comes torrential rain across the country. Come Sunday, a monster, slow-moving, low system with rain and wind from Invercargill to Cape Reinga. And then to top it off – come Monday, comes cyclone Ivy.’

  Fin-tis-tic! I can’t wait. In fact, I can barely contain myself.

  Waiau, Hurunui, Canterbury, 27 February

  If you let a little rain put you off (even a little cyclone), then you’d never get anywhere in this cycling-around-New-Zealand game. So I left behind all the Pacific Horizons, Britz, Apollo and Kea Campers, not to mention a posse of Hardtop Pop-Up caravans and Kiwi Experience, Flying Kiwi and Magic Travellers bus tours, cramming up the car parks and double-parking in Kaikoura, and set out for Hanmer Springs with the idea that I would ride inland over the Lewis Pass to the west coast before zigzagging back to the east coast over Arthur’s Pass and Porter’s Pass. Of course it would be a lot easier to continue south down the coast across the flat plains of Canterbury, but there’s something about mountains, especially the Southern Alps that extend in an unbroken northeast–southwest line for 450 km from Lewis Pass to Key Summit Divide on the Milford Road, which are just asking to be ridden over. Cyclone or no cyclone.

  A cold night was followed by a streaky red-sky dawn that turned the snow-tipped mountains to pink. Heavy dew quadrupled the weight of my tent this morning. I shook the better part of it off before rolling it up and taking off past Maori Leap Cave. I then turned my back on the sea and headed on to SH70 that for some touristy-branding reason had changed its name from the Inland Kaikoura Road to the Alpine Pacific Triangle. Apart from the fierce headwind and the air-sucking stock trucks that went barrelling past, this route proved hugely enjoyable for cycling – despite the steep climbs and continual roller-coaster gradients. It was a fantastically lonely road with no shops or communities for about 85 km, just the odd deer farm and sheep station and rock fall and lots of single-lane bridges. It was a good route for roadside grazing: the bushes were loaded with blackberries and there were plenty of trees weighted with wild apples. All I needed was some crumble topping and custard to complete the find.

  Talking of stock trucks, they travel at such a rollicking speed that I wasn’t surprised when I read in the paper the other day of two stock truck drivers who were trapped in their cabs and hundreds of dead and dying sheep were strewn for 100 metres after a smash near Dunedin. One of the double-trailer stock trucks lost control on a bend and a following truck full of ewes struck the crashed truck. The clean-up took more than seven hours.

  I trundled onward past and through such places as Kowhai (‘tall cattle’), Mount Furneaux, Green Burn, Hawk Hills, Surrey Hills (though no sign of Woking or Guildford), Mount Horrible, Black Stream, Humbug Stream, Stag and Spey Road, Cloudy Range Road, Mount Lyford ski resort (no snow, just deserted slopes of grey scree topping a thicket of forest that looked as if it had slipped down the mountain), Mount Tinline, Lottery River and Stackhouses Road. I was hauling myself over a particularly steep hill when I caught sight of a blur of cyclist streaking down the road in the opposite direction. It was the electrically long-haired Austrian wizard whom I had briefly met at the cicada-infested campsite at East Cape. I was still inching my way upwards when I spotted him again far below following the thread of road along the bottom of the river valley. He saw me and waved, so I waved back and then I had something happen to me that never had before: I was yodelled to. A proper mountain-echoing Austrian yodel that bounced back and forth from one hillside to another. How touching.

  And then he stopped. So I stopped. And he shouted, ‘Are you vell?’

  So I shouted back, ‘All well, thank you!’

  It was like a sort of Shackleton exchange when Ernest finally returned to Elephant Island to rescue his men and had shouted out across the water a greeting along similar lines.

  At last I rolled into Waiau, which means ‘swirling river’, though it sounds more to me like a Geordie greeting. After passing not one store all day, Waiau was a hive of commercial activity. There was a dairy, a takeaway, a tearoom, a hotel, a small Four Square and a Hammer Hardware store. And a dump of a motorcamp. Which is where I am now, camping as far away as I can from three big snarlingly delirious dogs attached by chain to a kennel. Apart from two caravans, the place is deserted. One caravan is coated in a mossy slime and doesn’t look as if it has gone anywhere for the past forty years. It belongs to a bearded and long-haired man with a hat who slouches about in the shadows. I came across him in the tip of a kitchen eating a big fry-up, fag hanging limply from lips. He told me he’d been doing odd jobs around here for a while, working on the roads, that kind of thing, but was thinking of going north to pick fruit because he’d heard they were looking for pickers and packers.

  The other caravan belongs to George and Elaine. George was originally from Southport, just north of Liverpool. ‘I came out here in ’seventy-five – before your time,’ said George (incorrectly). ‘During the miner’s strike. I got a job as a motor mechanic.’

  When I asked him if he had ever gone back to Southport he said, ‘Only once. I’m not a snob, but I looked around me at the downcast faces and shabbiness and I thought: well, at least I’ve made something of my life.’

  We had a bit more chat and when George found out I was cycling around the country he advised me to be careful, especially with my possessions. ‘New Zealand’s not what it used to be. I’m not being prejudiced, but it’s mostly the Maoris you got to watch.’ He turned to Elaine and said, ‘Remember up north that Maori guy who got chatting to us and then ran off with our mate’s wallet?’

  Then the rain started so we retreated to our respective abodes. As the water cascaded down the sides of my tent, I turned on my radio and heard a man telling me, ‘This country’s at a crossroads. We’ve had the Maori Renaissance; we’ve had the burgeoning Asian population. We have the possibility of all this upset and hatred tearing us apart.’

  Hanmer Springs, Hurunui, Canterbury, 28 February

  It rained all night. And it rained all morning. Finally at about two o’clock this afternoon it decided to take a break. So I threw the whole sopping lot of my nylon abode into my panniers and took off for Hanmer Springs before the weather decided to do the dirty on me again. I sped off along the flat of the Emu Plains to Rotherham, then veered off on to Flintoft–Mouse Point Road until I hit the busy SH7, with its fast cars sporting licence plates trumpeting things like COCKY and logging trucks with plates saying things like LOGGER 1. The road went up and down and up and down as I crossed over the likes of Brown Stream, Deadman’s Stream and Stinking Stream. One bridge was accompanied by a small forest of white crosses. Yet more road deaths.

  On one of the hills two Lycra-sheathed men on road bikes sped past me. The rear rider called, ‘Hang in there!’ as he flashed by. ‘I’m hanging,’ I called back, though I wasn’t quite sure to what.

  At Waiau Ferry Bridge I turned off for Hanmer and crossed a spectacular bridge, 115 feet high and 117 years old, from which a couple of scared-looking people were forking out $100 each to jump from a special bungee-jumping gantry. Across the way at the Thrillseekers Canyon Centre, others were gearing themselves up for a session of jet-boating or white-water rafting. I can’t say the
idea of spending large amounts of money for a wet, heart-attack-inducing ride appeals to me. I find it quite exciting enough simply trying to cycle to wherever it is I’m trying to go before a cyclone hits me.

  Deer Valley, Hurunui, Canterbury, 29 February

  I’ve just realized that it’s leap year day today. Where’s Gary so I can ask him whether he’d care to take my hand in marriage as his wedded nagging wife? Oh, I’ve just remembered – he’ll be up to the rafters with his undersquinted abutments and compact stub tie truss posts in his wood-filled workshop 15,000 miles away. That’s the trouble with me – always in the wrong place at the wrong time. I must learn to position myself more carefully.

  Last night, which was wet and windy, I camped overlooking Dog Creek beside a Nomad Nifty Pop-Up Hard-Top – one of those soft-sided caravans that resurrect themselves from a trailer. This morning my neighbouring Nifty Pop-Up resembled more a small swimming pool than a place of shelter. It seemed one of the sides had blown in.

  Most people come to Hanmer Springs to wallow in the mineral pools of Hanmer Springs Thermal Reserve (motto: ‘The Natural Place to Unwind’) while gazing up with an appreciative unwinding sigh at the surrounding snowy peaks. But the pools all looked a bit busy and anyway I’d had quite enough of getting wet lately, on top of which I had a mountain pass to be tackling before the weather caved in on me again. So once I’d mended a rip in my flysheet (I’d hung my tent over a fence to dry but a small protrusion of wire slashed a foot-long tear in the material) I set off into a thumping great headwind for the Lewis Pass. I thought this would be quite a popular route for touring cyclists but not one bicycle passed me all day. Maybe they knew something that I didn’t.