by Josie Dew
After stashing a handful of dollars into my wallet at the Westpac Bank, filling up with water at the Fastlane Coffee Lounge and sending a small package to Auckland-based Jacquie from Waiouru’s shed-sized Post Shop, I cycled out of town past Subway, the Lion Red Oasis pub, the Hiway Robbery Cafe and the multiple outlets for Tip Top ‘Real Dairy Icecream’. Still on SH1 on a course for Rotorua, I joined the Desert Road. As I rode up on to the exposed volcanic plateau, the bitter wind socked me in my face and turned my hands and feet to stone. The Desert Road crosses the Rangipo Desert, which is not a true desert but named as such due to its barren near-desert area and hostile appearance. Hour after hour I battled onwards, all the time watched over by the brooding conical form of volcanic Mount Ruapehu. At one point, huddling in the cold beside a clump of wind-tossed tussock while devouring a bagful of food, it suddenly occurred to me that it would be more fun to save Rotorua’s volcanic mud baths and thermal pools to do with Gary. So I jumped back on my bike and headed back the way I’d come. Instead of heading north, I would now head south, then west, then south, before veering west around Mount Taranaki – New Zealand’s Mount Fuji, occupying the bulge on North Island’s western coast – before riding north up to Auckland.
Back in Waiouru I turned right to skirt the southern flanks of Mount Ruapehu and bowled along following a stepped downhill. At Tangiwai, about 8 km west of Waiouru, I passed the spot of New Zealand’s worst rail disaster where 151 rail passengers were killed when the overnight express train between Wellington and Auckland plunged into the flooded Whangaehu River on Christmas Eve in 1953. The accident was caused by a sudden release of thousands of tonnes of water from the crater lake of Mount Ruapehu which surged down the Whangaehu River in a massive wave. The swift and turbulent deluge, known as a lahar, uplifted massive quantities of sand, silt, boulders and muddy debris. Sometime between 10.10 and 10.15 p.m. the lahar struck the concrete pylons of the Tangiwai railway bridge, sweeping away three-quarters of the decking and track. Minutes later a young Taihape postal clerk saw the light of the approaching locomotive Ka 949. In a desperate attempt to warn the driver, he ran towards the train waving a torch. The driver saw the torch and braked, but not soon enough and the train plummeted into the river. Of the 285 people on board, 131 bodies were recovered and twenty people were never accounted for; it was presumed they were washed 100 km down the river and out to sea.
Somewhere between Carrot Corner and Wanganui, 19 May
I was welcomed into Ohakune last night by a gaudy model of a giant carrot, as tall as a tree, sprouting from the ground in tribute to the town’s primary product. Most visitors to Ohakune came here not to indulge their passions in the simple delights of a tapering orange root vegetable, but to go skiing or tramping, or horse-trekking or jet-boating or white-water rafting. This is because Ohakune (Maori for ‘place to be careful’) was known as the gateway to the Mount Ruapehu ski areas and Tongariro National Park. As if to validate this claim, a woman drove past in a car with a licence plate saying: SHE SKI. Never mind alpine lodgings or après-ski facilities – all I wanted was information on the state of the road to Wanganui, as rumour had it that it had borne the brunt of the February storms and had partially disappeared. The woman in the tourist office told me that the road was now open though reduced to lots of single-lane sections where the landslides still encroached upon it. She also said that, from Ohakune, the road to Wanganui was mostly all downhill.
All I can say to that is she can’t have been a cyclist. As State Highway 4 followed the Mangawhero River, the road went up and down and up and down and up and down as it climbed away from and dropped away to the river. During the February floods this river, which cuts deep into the mudstone hills, caused havoc in the area by flooding farmland and washing away bridges and trees. The road was still full of hazard signs warning ‘SLIPS!’ where the rain had caused numerous mudslides, washing away whole strips and chunks of road that collapsed into the river. Teams of road gangs in day-glo orange coats buzzed about rebuilding the highway and trucking heaps of mud and rockfall out of the ravine. Down below, the riverbanks looked like the aftermath of a battle, with an entanglement of drowned and river-washed trees lying ensnared like a mesh of snarled corpses.
Along this 100 km-odd stretch of road there was just one tiny settlement, Kakatahi, which made for a virtually traffic-free ride. Just south of the very splashy Raukawa Falls, I spent the night camping down by the river at an in-the-middle-of-nowhere YMCA. The place was run by affable Rosaline, a terrifically sturdy woman with a gammy leg – a result of having wrenched it climbing on to her sit-on mower. She was preparing food in the industrial kitchen for an onslaught of young teenagers on parole scheduled to arrive by bus in the morning to pick sack-loads of walnuts for a company in Wanganui. Rosaline was a generous soul and gave me a big bag full of silverbeet, cauliflower, tomatoes and mushrooms for my tea. Back in my tent I heard on the news that three boys had been caught red-handed smashing up a school in Invercargill, causing $10,000 worth of damage. The boys, who were aged six, eight and ten, were referred to on the news as ‘pint-sized vandals’. They should get them up here to pick walnuts.
Hawera, Taranaki, 22 May
Somewhere around Otomoa (‘to cut grass mechanically’) Road and Bennyfield Hill, I looked out across a spectacular choppy sea of emerald green hills. At Upokongaro (‘United Possum Organisation of Central African State of Kangaroos’) I merged with the mighty Whanganui River before coming to rest in the historic city of Wanganui itself. Stretching nearly 300 km, the Whanganui is the third longest (and the longest navigable) river in New Zealand, whereas Wanganui is one of New Zealand’s oldest cities (founded in the relatively ancient times of 1841), but it’s obviously not as important as the river because it lacks the extra ‘h’.
All over New Zealand there are ‘Fire Risk Warning Monitors’ on big billboard devices at the roadside with an arrow pointing to a colour-coded ‘Low’, ‘Medium’ or ‘High’, depending on the current wet or dry situation of the ground. But on the busy truck-laden road to Hawera, I passed a similar sort of roadside device claiming to be a ‘Facial Eczema Monitor’. There was something in the corner of the board referring to ‘Pet Care’. Quite what all that was about I don’t want to know.
It was all big dairy and sheep country round here, the sleek steel Fonterra milk tankers being the most prominent trucks on the road. The rain poured from the grubby skies, the spray splashed in a filthy wet cloud from the passing thundering trucks. Patea was a depressingly deserted and run-down place with boarded-up shops and the odd bored-looking Maori wandering around. Loud music reverberated from shabby houses whose front gardens lay stacked full of old car parts. One gate had a picture of a pitbull terrier nailed to it with the warning words: ‘DOG WILL BITE YOU’. Don’t think I’ll be going in there, then.
By the time I reached Hawera I was a mobile puddle. Water dripped and drained from every catchment area. I could even feel waves in my shoes. The woman in the tourist office said to me, ‘I could never imagine travelling alone on a bike.’ Shame that, because I can fully recommend it. Even in the rain.
New Plymouth, Taranaki, 26 May
In Hawera, due to all ground being flooded, I camped in a cabin at the motorcamp with the camp cat called Fluffette. The middle-aged skinhead in the next-door cabin was a big bloke covered top to toe in tattoos. He liked his fags and his drink and knocking on my door for a chat. ‘I come down here every weekend,’ he told me. ‘The woman I’m going with at the moment – a hairdresser in town – lives just down the road, but her daughter don’t much take to me. She’s in the army, you know. I call her GI Jane. So when she comes home at weekends, I move up here to the cabin.’
Another time he stuck his head around the door and said, ‘You smoke dope, mate?’
I said, ‘No, sorry!’
He said, ‘No worries. I just thought all backpackers smoke dope. Mate of mine grows a big patch of it. If you change your mind, give us a shout. I’ve got a bagful if you wa
nt it!’
From Hawera most traffic heads north on SH3 direct to New Plymouth. I veered off on the coast road that is known as Surf Highway 45. At first I thought this appellation referred to the splooshing surfing effect of all the water on the road (it was still raining a storm), but then it dawned on me that it was alluding not to the undulating aquaplaning but to the surfing Mecca spots that adorn these shores.
If you’d asked me where I might find the Bread Capital of the World, I would have said somewhere like Germany or any patisserie in France or the cobble-hilled, bicycle-pushing Hovis-filmed advert town of Shaftsbury, Dorset. But no, no and no. Just west of Hawera I rode past a large and tasteless plastic model of a loaf of bread on a pole heralding my arrival in the rather nondescript town of Manaia, the one and only ‘Bread Capital of the World’. Well, blow me. Apparently Manaia, which served the local farming and petrochemical industries, had a local bakery that exported worldwide. A quite staggering fact, I think you’ll agree.
Somewhere near Pihama (‘mother’s ham pie’) the sun came out and for the first time I had a proper sight of the mountain that looks just like Mount Fuji, so much so that Tom Cruise had not long since left the area after filming The Last Samurai. (‘Ah so desuka?’) This 2,518-metre mountain, known to some as Mount Egmont and to others as Mount Taranaki, is the symmetrical centrepiece of this land-bulging province. Although the region in which Mount Taranaki sits is called Taranaki (the Maori name for the dormant volcano), the national park containing Mount Taranaki has retained the name of Egmont National Park. Egmont is the name Captain Cook gave the volcano, calling it after the Earl of Egmont, who had encouraged his long-range expedition. Just to confuse things further, Taranaki’s cape is known as Cape Egmont, whereas the waters on either side of the cape are called the North and South Taranaki Bights.
The sun accentuated the colours of the area to the extreme – the fertile lushness of the green pastures, the coal-black volcanic sand of the beaches, the dazzling white snow on the mountain and the astonishing blue of the sky. In places, where lava had long solidified into heaps, the shape of the land turned to crowds of little green hills with rounded tops. Some of the hills bore curves and divots and wave-like ribs, but in other areas the ground had a pocked and tousled look. All of this hummocky land was clothed in an unreal green and dotted with cattle.
Although it was most pleasing to feel the warming rays of the sun on my back again, I knew it wouldn’t last – I could see the dark smudge of clouds piling up on the Tasman’s westerly horizon and feel the wind rising once more and smell the nearness of the rain. By the time I had arrived in New Plymouth and propped my bike on the seafront at the base of the severely wind-bending Wind Wand (a weirdly attractive 45-metre red flexi-stick designed by the kinetic artist Len Lye that can bow and sway in the fierce Tasman winds up to 20 metres from the vertical) it was pouring again, the cold and violent wind hurling the rain across the streets in sheets.
Te Kuiti, Waitomo, 28 May
All I can say about the last two days is: storms, gales, hills, saddles, mounts, tunnels, gorges and bush. Lots of bush. Stretching for unpopulated miles and miles. At the roadside the variegated greens of the bush begin, then give way to the black-green of distant hills. The region I’m in now is called Waitomo, meaning the place where wai (water) disappears into a tomo (hole in the ground, otherwise known as cave). There are hundreds of limestone caves all over the area whose watery caverns have been turned into a tourist-luring ‘experience’ for such delights as abseiling into them down water-spouting walls, floating among them on giant inner tubes or being guided through them in boats to see cave-dwelling glow-worms. Well, I can do without all that drenched and dripping rigmarole, thank you very much. After all this rain, I’m like a Waitomo myself – a place where rainwater disappears into the various caverns and crevices about my person.
Eventually I emerged into yet another ‘capital of the world’ – this one Te Kuiti (verb: ‘to quit, to go, to leave’), ‘The Shearing Capital of the World’, marked by the prominently domineering statue of a sheep-shearing man. On a male theme, if not a sheep one, I was now in what’s called King Country – named after the Maori king movement of the 1850s, which developed locally and sought to unite the tribes on a national basis. New Zealand may be currently lacking a Maori king, but this is more than made up for by a mouthful, namely Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu, the Maori queen whose official residence is at the Turangawaewae Marae, at the northern end of Ngaruawahia – the Maori capital of New Zealand.
Auckland, 30 May
As it happened, I passed the abode of Te Arikinui Dame Te Atairangikaahu in Ngaruawahia, but I couldn’t see a lot as it was raining so heavily. Ngaruawahia, which is Maori for ‘broken open food pits’, sits at the confluence of the Waipa (‘electrically operated blade with rubber edge wiping a windscreen clear of rain or snow’) and Waikato (‘querulous calling of domestic feline’) Rivers. The Waikato is the longest river in New Zealand, flowing 425 km from the icy slopes of Mount Ruapehu on the volcanic plateau, passing through forest and steamy thermal areas and thundering down waterfalls before making a more placid journey through farmland on its way west to the Tasman Sea. What with these two fat swollen banked rivers, together with all the horizontal rain and dripping clouds of truck-sperlunking road-splashed spray making it feel akin to cycling into the flow of a fireman’s hose, my abiding memory of Ngaruawahia is an exceptionally wet one.
In true New Zealand style, the weather remained atrocious as I careered past Lake Waikare (‘questionable possession of his car’ – otherwise known in Maori as ‘rippling water’), Te Kauwhata (‘to water a cow’), Pokeno (‘no prodding allowed’), Bombay, Ramarama (‘ra-ra-ing mother’), Drury and Papakura (‘papa can cure her’).
The last leg was so abominably wet and traffic-laden that to spare myself from a premature death I boarded a bus driven by a man called Lindsay. Suddenly I was among a world of rules. Having been too wet outside to eat anything in my normal roadside grazing manner, I was banking on hungrily scoffing a pannier-load of fodder once seated on the bus. But Lindsay was having none of it. ‘I allow no eating or drinking on my bus,’ he said, ‘because I’m sick of clearing up other people’s chunder off the seats and carpet.’ Well, it’s amazing how much you can eat surreptitiously behind a hand, even when sitting up front behind the rule-making driver as he keeps an eye on you in his mirror.
Apart from his no-eating regulation, Lindsay was a good and informative soul who told me that the clumps of New Zealand flax that sometimes manage to grow in trees are known as ‘widow makers’, due to their propensity to fall from a great height on to a man’s head and kill him. As we whooshed through Papatoetoe (‘father of two-digit foot’), Lindsay informed me that we were about to pass over the narrowest strip of New Zealand – all of a few strides wide. The street across this one-and-a-half kilometre strip is called Portage Road because the Maori discovered it was far easier to carry their canoes over this slender neck of land from Otahuhu Creek to Manukau Harbour than it was to paddle right up and over the top of North Island among the big seas off Cape Reinga.
During the bus journey, the wipers working furiously to clear the buckets of rain from the windscreen, it occurred to me that I had been in this Land of the Long White Cloud and Never-Ending-Rain for almost half a year now. And drawing on my thought processes I accumulated a few ruminations on various aspects of New Zealand from a cyclist’s point of view. Here they are:
WEATHER:
Couldn’t be wetter if it tried, but then I have landed here in the wettest, windiest, coldest, most floodiest and horriblest summer on record.
TIP : Bring clipless welly boots, a floating tent and a set of sixteen small anchors in place of tent pegs complete with buoys to facilitate location in morning.
WIND:
Strong and gale force from every direction but always against you.
TIP: Hoist the mizzen and tack hard on wide roads to ease your journey (method not recom
mended in close proximity to 50-tonne logging trucks).
ADDED EXTRA: Fold down wing mirrors to reduce wind resistance, close mouth and tape back ears to help with aerodynamic properties.
ROAD SURFACE:
METALLED ROADS: Chippings vary from fist to saucer-size resulting in an energy-sapping tyre-munching ride. Otherwise fin-tis-tic.
UNMETALLED ROADS: Vary from lung-choking dust to hub-sinking mud and from loch-sized water-filled potholes to slinky smooth if you manage to slalom among the copious gravel and bouncing boulders.
VOLUME OF VEHICULAR TRAFFIC:
Far from a cyclist’s paradise in this department. For a country reputedly full of sheep there’s an awful lot of cars and volumes vary from constant flow to sporadic flurries based on ferry timetables to rugged remoteness of road.
ATTITUDE AND SKILL (OR NOT) OF DRIVERS:
Diabolical! Worst ever experienced! The majority seem convinced that the only place for a cyclist is in the ditch and if you’re not in it, they will soon put you there. Oncoming vehicles take perverse pleasure in overtaking directly into your path. In essence, Kiwis drive too fast, too close, too aggressively and too inconsiderately. Give me the kamikaze bus drivers in India any day.
GENERAL STANDARD OF CAMPGROUNDS:
Top notch. Most have kitchens with fridges/freezers/ovens/ hobs/microwaves/gas barbecues and instant boiling water ‘Zip’ machines, which saves a lot on ye olde camp fuel.
WILD CAMPING: