Long Cloud Ride

by Josie Dew

It’s always good to hear the Queen going a little potty-mouthed. Brings her down to earth a peg or two.

  One of the pluses about staying at this rather fancy campsite (apart from the view) is the outdoor swimming pool. Despite it feeling like plunging into the Channel in winter, I’ve been swimming twice a day going up and down and up and down doing one-legged crawl. Means I can still do exercise while giving my ankle a rest. By the time I get out I’m so cold that my whole body is shaking and it takes me about fifteen minutes in a hot shower to get any sense of feeling back.

  Today, though, as my ankle has felt ready to go, I’ve been on an injury-testing cycle. Trouble is, I really need to be ankle-testing in a flat place like the Fens or The Netherlands and not the Banks Peninsula, which is one of the hilliest places I’ve ever cycled. The peninsula was formed following violent eruptions by three volcanoes and its coastline resembles stumpy fingers of land between which the Pacific laps into high-cliffed bays and long deep harbours. Summit Road is the only road that crosses the middle of the peninsula and, as its name suggests, it traverses the highest ridges of this massively crumpled area. On a good day, the views from Summit Road are almost too good to be true, surrounded as you are by a 360-degree view of slopes tumbling away from you to the slender necks of water ringed by creased and rugged hills with rock faces bursting from the crests.

  Cycling up and down and in and out of the bays of Pigeon, Okains, Le Bons and Little Akaloa tested my ankle above and beyond the call of duty. I knew I probably shouldn’t be putting my flimsy limb under such strain, but I just couldn’t resist. Sitting around waiting for injuries to mend is not my strong point, especially when the sun’s out and I’m surrounded by a wrinkled and rumpled land of the most amazing beauty.

  Greg has long gone, taking the bus back to Christchurch to pick up his wheels and resume his trailer-pulling journey north. The interesting thing about staying somewhere a while is to watch people coming and going. One woman I met in the campsite kitchen was a Scot, now living in Australia. She told me that as a student she went to work in Butlin’s in Bognor and progressed from a Blue Coat to a Red Coat. ‘I moved to Oz because I could earn twice as much money than staying at home,’ she told me, ‘though that’s not the case any more.’ When I asked her if she ever went back to Scotland she said, ‘Occasionally. But I would never live there again. The people have tunnel vision.’

  Talking of Scots, who should arrive on the scene but Anne-Marie? She was no longer part of the travelling threesome – and hadn’t been since I last saw her, when she really did go her own way after splitting up from Pete and Bridget. She hadn’t regretted one minute of being by herself. She cycled down the West Coast to Queenstown where, because she was running out of time (she was due to fly home to Glasgow), she took the bus to Christchurch. She told me she found the competitive side of Bridget too hard to deal with. ‘I was always cycling behind and I couldn’t enjoy the scenery because I was always trying to catch up.’ She also said that, although she thought that turning to alternative therapies had helped Bridget a lot, she had told Bridget she thought she was taking things a step too far when, as instructed by her Reiki Master, she threw some crystals into the sea in New Zealand in the name of inner healing sanctity. ‘She didnae take kindly to tha’!’

  A most peculiar English couple travelling around in a little jeep put up a tent almost on top of me last night despite there being a huge space the other side of the tree. The man was as thin as a toothpick with eyes netted with wrinkles, while the woman was built like a hippo – her ample size accentuated by wearing a crinoline skirt which stood out like a frilled lampshade. How they squeezed into a tent the size of a coffin, I don’t know. It was hardly a surprise to hear them not getting on too well (words travel through tent walls as easily and audibly as through thin air). It was about ten o’clock when all the crackling of crinoline and shuffling of sleeping bags finally settled down. Despite it being a cold night (the last few nights have necessitated sleeping with socks on) I heard Mrs Lampshade release a huge discontented sigh before unhappily muttering, ‘It’s hot in here!’

  ‘It won’t be at two o’ clock in the morning,’ replied the long-suffering husband in a tetchy tone. There then followed a five-minute argument which reignited the fuel from a previous argument – a subject that Mrs Lampshade obviously wanted nothing else to do with because she said, ‘As far as I’m concerned that’s all done and dusted!’

  The husband replied in something of a similar nature, but she wasn’t standing for that because she said, ‘Well it’s obviously still narking you as you’re still slating me for it!’

  The arguing went on and on. The woman’s favourite phrase was: ‘For your information … !’ She would prefix every shouted sentence with, ‘For your information …’ before going on to say that she had said this or said that. Finally I plugged into my radio and went to sleep. In the morning the bickering couplet packed up without saying a word to each other. Their body language was not good.

  More comings and goings in the camp kitchen. A boy on a bike with long blond curls arrived on the scene. He was cycling around South Island in what sounded like about two weeks flat. He told me he was from Belgium so I asked if he was a Walloon – a fine air-inflated word to describe a part of Belgium’s population who speak a French dialect, as opposed to the Flanders-dwelling Flemish who speak Dutch. Unfortunately I never quite grabbed whether he was a Walloon or not because we immediately got on to the subject of Belgian people in general who have bricks in their stomachs. The Belgian boy told me that in Belgium the expression ‘to have a brick in your stomach’ meant that you didn’t want to travel, you just wanted to stay at home. ‘Most Belgians have bricks in their stomachs,’ he said.

  Later on two girls who put their tent up beside me parked their 4WD Toyota Hilux Surf bang in front of my tent, obscuring my sweeping panorama of the harbour and hills. Their bumper sticker declared: ‘Fishing is not a matter of life or death. It is more serious than that.’ The girls didn’t look like fishers. They looked more like clubbers. As soon as their tent was up, one of the girls, who was rushing around trying to find her ‘smokes’, tripped over a guyline and nearly knocked herself out on the back bumper of her Hilux Surf. She was wearing a tight pink T-shirt that said, ‘REQUIRES CONSTANT SUPERVISION’. I could see why.

  Little River, Banks Peninsula, Canterbury, 18 March

  For hundreds of years the Banks Peninsula had been settled by Maoris and all was going well for them (specially the Ngai Tahu tribe) until they got into a right old hullabaloo of bloody intertribal wars which contributed indirectly to the decision taken by the British government to install a governor and sign the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. The French missed their chance to establish sovereignty on the peninsula by a few days. Akaroa had been the site of a French whaling station prior to the establishment of the town. In 1838 Jean Langlois, a captain of one of the whaling ships, deciding he rather liked the look of the place, negotiated with a local Maori chief to buy the peninsula. He returned to France to gather together about sixty emigrants, but by the time they had sailed back to Akaroa they found the British flag flying. Still, there’s lots of French influence remaining in the town (plenty of croissants and French fare served everywhere in places like Jaques Cafe, the Turenne Coffee Shop, Chez Marc and Cafe Eiffel). Everywhere you walk there are streets with names like Rue Jolie, Rue Benoit and Rue Renard. The architecture, an eclectic mix of French and British, is what makes Akaroa the most attractive place I’ve come across yet. It certainly beats the uninspirational standard format of most Kiwi towns.

  Just before I left Akaroa, I was shopping in the small Four Square when I was intercepted by a couple from Romsey in Hampshire who told me they had come to a Japanese cycling talk I’d given in London a few years ago. (‘Ah so, desu-ka?’) Although Kathy and Gordon weren’t currently travelling by bike, they had done some cycling in New Zealand in the past so we compared notes for a while, as you do. At one point Gordon told me how not that l
ong ago he was cycling from Land’s End to John o’ Groats when he fell off his bike in Wolverhampton, around the halfway mark, and broke his hip. ‘Spent two months flat on my back in hospital,’ he said. ‘The doctors looked at my notes and said I might as well throw my bike away.’ Five months later he was back on his bike and went off to Wolverhampton to finish the ride.

  Unless you turn your bike into a pedalo, it’s impossible to pedal off the Banks Peninsula without meeting several substantial hills. One route is easier than the other and climbs up from sea level to about 1,500 feet. I went the other way, the way that leads you up a vertical back road to almost 2,000 feet. This road was so steep and my ankle so weak and my panniers so heavy that it took me just under two hours to ride 6 km. Though it rained all last night, this morning was sunny and quite hot. But as I hauled myself up to 2,000 feet the sky filled and sagged and reached down to envelop me in barricades of mist, turning my sweat to shivers. I had chosen this route up to Summit Road, not to ruin my ankle completely, but because it was empty of traffic compared with the coast road and offered top-notch views. Well, it did last time I was up here. Still, it was rather lovely being encased in a cotton-wool world. It made the apparitions of the skeletal windblown trees and the moaning wind in the power lines all the more atmospheric. Things turned even more moody when the mist occasionally parted, revealing a miniature cove or bay or harbour far below bathed in sun. On either side of the Summit Road, the mist-cracked land fell away, turning from grey to green to blue, then evolved into a crazed fretwork of foggy islands and sea lakes and strange peaks.

  What a difference a gradient makes! Falling back down off Summit Road from the fittingly named Hilltop took just seven minutes to cover the same distance of 6 km. I’m now down at Little River, camping in a bird sanctuary surrounded by Chinese quail, golden pheasants, paradise ducks and shining cuckoos. There are various hens and bantams roosting in the toilets and showers too. Lends a rather alternative edge to the performing of one’s ablutions.

  Mount Somers, Ashburton, Canterbury, 21 March

  Until I came to New Zealand I had never heard of braided rivers. Maybe I didn’t pay enough attention to Mrs Outlaw, my Geography teacher at school. Cycling into Rakaia I rode 1.8 km over what the tourist leaflet says is ‘the longest bridge over the widest braided river in the southern hemisphere’. It certainly looked quite impressive – multiple channels of water divided by sandy alluvial deposits. Seems people come to Rakaia not so much for the braided variety of this river as for its salmon. ‘The Salmon Capital of New Zealand’ is how Rakaia likes to brand itself, emphasised by an eyesore in the shape of a roadside model of a large leaping salmon the size of a small whale mounted high in the air on a pole stuck uncomfortably up its bottom.

  It is flat cycling around here. The wide Canterbury plains feel as if they stretch into infinity. Far over to the west they stretch as far as the scalloped crinkle of distant Southern Alps, where the land doesn’t so much roll up to meet the mountains as rudely cough them straight up. Down on the plains the green and ochre-coloured land is a vast patchwork of giant fields, covering an area of more than 12,000 square kilometres.

  This area had once been cloaked with forest, with a sizeable Maori population living in coastal areas. These early Maori roamed the plains hunting the giant flightless moa, using fire to flush their prey from the forests. Over time, the trees as well as the birds were destroyed, leaving a barren, windblown waste. The first Europeans to arrive saw the plains as a desert, tussocky and gravelly and often lacking fresh water. Today they are a criss-cross of horizontals, divided by long spearing Roman-straight roads and shelter belts – thirty-foot-tall hedges of cypress-smelling macro-carpa that act as windbreaks to the howling nor’westers and are vital in protecting the plains (and cyclists) from damage and erosion. Left to their own devices, the plains would be arid and parched. But when ex-Indian army officer Colonel De Renzie Brett came this way, he initiated a water-race system that brought life-giving water for irrigation. Cycling across this iron-flat land, I kept hearing and catching sight of the restless waters of the irrigation channels busily gushing behind a complex maze of mini dykes.

  Somewhere near the junction of Tramway Road and Spoors Forks Road, a 4WD with a GO FISH licence plate and a car sticker that said YES YOU CAN-TERBURY stopped up ahead and a woman jumped out and a gave me two carrier bags full of home-grown runner beans and peaches. She said that what I was doing was ‘awesome’ and that she thought I looked like I could do with a good load of runner beans and peaches. How anyone looks like they need a good runner bean and peach, I don’t know, but I accepted them gratefully anyway.

  *

  The wind was blowing hard from just the sort of direction that I didn’t want it to blow: head-on off the mountains. It made cycling along an endlessly straight road that tilted gradually uphill feel as if I was dragging a concrete girder behind my wheels. The telegraph poles crept by in slow motion. At last I arrived in Mount Somers, a small smattering of houses just south of Windwhistle and Pudding Hill. There was not a lot at Mount Somers: a motel, a motor camp, a pub and a small wooden general store complete with an ancient petrol pump standing to attention outside like a stiff-upper-lip red British pillar box. There were a lot more trees up here, but although autumn was beginning to tighten its chilling grip in the evening air, I’d noticed that the leaves weren’t changing colour yet, though they did have that slightly off look that meant they were just about to do so.

  Weather in New Zealand can change in a flash. When I put up my tent in the Mount Somers campsite the sun was hot and the wind still warm and strong from the northwest. Good clothes-drying weather. So I hurriedly washed everything washable I possessed apart from the minimal clothing I was wearing. Five minutes after I had hung everything out on the line, the wind swung round to the south, the temperature dropped by ten degrees and the sun was something of distant memory. A muffling Antarctic fog rolled in, shortly followed by a glacial rain. I had to throw on my hat and jacket over my flimsy shorts and T-shirt and climb into my sleeping bag to prevent a sudden onset of hypothermia.

  After a while I went to sit in the small kitchen to drink a pint of tea and write my diary and some letters. An hour later, the only other person staying on the site (in one of the on-site cabins) walked through the door. For the next two hours I chatted nonstop with Kathy Rogers, a garrulous and vivacious Irishwoman originally from Dublin. Home for Kathy was a forty-two-foot gaff rigger steel boat called Leto (daughter of Apollo, said Kathy, when I looked a bit blank) on which she sailed the world with her partner Peter. Peter was South African, but he had left the country when he was nineteen to live on boats. On their latest leg, they’d sailed to New Zealand from Panama, taking in a plethora of South Pacific islands on the way with Tonga coming out top. About three weeks between land had been their longest sea passage so far. While at sea they tended to live on tins of beans and tomatoes, pasta, powdered milk, bread that Kathy made every couple of days if the sea allowed, and fish caught over the side. For fresh fruit and vegetables, Kathy said potatoes, onions, carrots and green tomatoes all kept fine. ‘Most fruit keeps pretty well,’ said Kathy, ‘as long as I buy it from a market. Any supermarket fruit that has been refrigerated is useless.’

  Kathy had been walking around Mount Somers and, before that, Stewart Island for two weeks, leaving Peter back in Whangarei, north of Auckland, which was where they were currently based while living and working on the boat in dry dock for about a year before they set sail for Chile or Indonesia and Sri Lanka. ‘Peter’s a carpenter, so he does all the work himself, which is handy,’ said Kathy.

  She called the shiny and expensive fibre-glass yachts that yachties flounce around on in marinas ‘plastic fantastics’. And she likened marinas to caravan parks. ‘I admit there is a lot of snobbery that goes on between those of us who like to think we properly use and sail our boats, and those who simply keep a yacht as another expensive status symbol!’

  She and Peter certainly
sounded like ‘real’ sailors. They had no radar (‘though we ought to get one’) and they had nothing electrical on the boat. No electric heating, no electric lighting, no nothing. But Kathy thought that as they got older (she was probably hovering around the fifty mark now) they might have to splash out on some electric winches to help them on their way. ‘As for navigation,’ said Kathy, ‘we have always used a sextant, though we do now have a little handheld GPS, which is very useful when approaching a port in thick fog.’

  I told her I had sailed to New Zealand on a Russian freighter and that when I’d been on board I’d been quite concerned about the possibility of our vast lump of metal running down any single (or double-) handed sailors sailing around the world in small boats. ‘That was one of our big concerns,’ said Kathy. ‘A lot of the container ships don’t have radars manned twenty-four hours. Often we would ring up a ship on the VHF and no one would even answer.’

  Kathy was an English literature teacher so was thinking of trying to get a job teaching here in New Zealand. For a while we talked books. She said she didn’t like Jonathan Raban’s Passage to Juneau at all. ‘It was self-indulgent nonsense!’ said Kathy very certainly when I admitted I really quite enjoyed it – despite it being a bit heavy going in parts. She also thought Ellen MacArthur was too young to write an autobiography. For sailing books, she recommended that I should read Eric Hiscock’s books, such as Around the World in Wanderer III. Away from sailing, we both seemed to think highly of Dervla Murphy and Rose Tremain and we both agreed Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News was a top book.

  After this literary chat, Kathy asked me whether I was doing all my cycling alone or had anyone who was going to join me. I told her Gary might be coming out with his bike sometime, though it wasn’t that likely as he was a bit tied up with building and restoring oak-frame buildings. This got us on to the subject of Peter and Gary, both carpenters, who both seem to be able to mend or make anything they put their hand to, whether it be wood or metal or engines or whatever. I told Kathy that Gary can lose me very easily when he tries to explain to me how something like a centrifugal ball governor or a Wankel rotary engine might work, or even the finer details of a length jointing principal rafter where there is a chance of lower arris plate rotation. ‘If I start looking dazed,’ I said, ‘Gary says, “I’ll draw you a diagram, Jose,” which doesn’t really help, though I pretend it does and nod knowingly while I’m thinking: I must wash the kitchen floor later.’