Day7-12 Cardrona to Akaroa

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As always happens, the trip gets in the way of writing up the account. So almost a week has passed in blog time and I realise I have no chance in catching up. In an effort to ensure the blog is complete before I tell everyone about the trip in person, here is a synopsis of the past few days.



I am now sat in our bedroom in the Oinako B&B in Akaroa on the Banks peninsula, just SE of Christchurch. It’s a glorious day and Pam and I took a boat trip to spot the rare Hector’s Dolphin (the world’s smallest and rarest ocean mammal), little blue penguins (also the smallest) and fur seals earlier today. I think she is now somewhere in the village eating mussels and sipping Rosé. To look at, as we arrived yesterday in a gentle drizzle, the whole area reminded me like Cornwall but massively bigger, with Maori names and exotic plants and birds amongst the mundane. Its as if I was in a parallel universe where things were familiar to a causal gaze, yet not quite the same when examined closely, like Albion in Philip Putnam’s Dark Materials books, which is England but with daemons. Reality, but twisted one notch to the left.



We arrived here yesterday after a big day’s riding from Clyde, the one-time centre of the Otago Goldfields, where we had spent two nights. We stayed in a lovely lodge in town (Olivers), although I managed to keep Tara (one of our fellow travellers and in the next room) up all night with my snoring. The journey up was about 550Km they way we did it, over the Lindis Pass through the Southern Alps, across the Mackenzie Basin to a stop at the Astro Cafe. This is on top of Mt. John in the middle of the basin on the site of the observatories of Canterbury University. By day you have magnificent views of the basin and Lake Tekapo, which is a beautiful milky blue due to the glacial streams that feed it with copper-laced sediments. By night, you can see some of the best night skies in the world as the area has a light-pollution restriction policy. From there we continued north until due west of Christchurch and then turned south east to loop underneath the city, through farmland to get to the Banks Peninsula. At the end of a long day, we had an hour of riding fabulous tight twisty roads, up and over coastal hillsides, encountering bay after beautiful bay in a relentless reveal of some of the loveliest coastal scenery you are likely to find anywhere.



The previous day, whilst in Clyde, Pam and I, alone in the group, did some off-road stuff. Since we had all the gear and had told everyone of our previous exploits in Africa, we would have lost too much face had we bottled out of a day trip described in red ink as follows: “Warning: Unsealed, narrow, gravel, rocky, sandy slippery at times, sheer drops. Expert and Advanced gravel / adventure riders only”. What could possibly go wrong?



We set off from Clyde and headed to the start of the Skippers Road trail near Arrowton, which was not that far from Queenstown, where we had done the wet Tolkien trip. It was barely damp, and cool. We had our full enduro kit on for the first time, so at least we looked the part. On the way, we stopped by Kawarau Bridge, the home of Bungy Jumping and where it all started. AJ Hacket, a Kiwi, got the idea from those chaps who leap off bamboo structures with vines around their ankles in Vanuatu. Needless to say, we simply watched. Pam saw one woman jump then couldn’t take any more and went and did retail therapy in the gift shop. One small Asian boy of around twelve couldn’t bring himself to jump or turn back. The “helpers” assisted him in attaining an adequate level of courage by reducing the space between the edge, his body, and theirs. He launched, but not headfirst – not a great plan. Ended up tangled and holding on to the cord around his ankles whilst plummeting (see earlier blog post). He survived.



The track, once we turned off the metalled road, was about the width of a single car and no real problem. The surface was mainly loose gravel, with some squidgy clay from time to time as well as some exposed hard rock. The setting, though, was pretty terrifying in parts. The track wound its way down a steep gorge then back up again, following the line of a river that was used for white water rafting. And after five minutes a car travelling the other way at a significant rate of knots came flying round a blind corner with fortunately enough room to stop before it hit us and knocked us over the edge. This ensured a pretty cautious approach to the whole gig. We carried on to Skippers bridge, a rope suspension bridge with wooden planks to ride on…and we just did it without pausing to think too hard about it. On to the remains of a mountain community that existed up here during the gold rush, village school, houses, graveyard, quite amazing they chose this remote spot. And then a little further, across some streams and down to the place where they launch the rafts – the end of the road. We pause for thought then turn for home. Along the way, we encounter a lady stood beside her jeep and wave. Ten minutes later we are flagged down by a pretty exhausted looking mountain biker looking for his wife in a jeep…had we seen her as she had not stopped at the placed she should have? As we review the video to check it was her (I had offered to go get her if it was) she turns up. All smiles and off we go to Arrowton, stop for a carrot cake and coffee instead of lunch, a quick peruse of the wool shops and its back to Clyde for dinner.



We had stayed a couple of nights in a place called Te Anau before Clyde. This is a pretty sleepy place in Fiordland, which, as the name suggests, is where they have some pretty amazing Fjord like scenery. Travelling to Clyde from Te Anau, we had travelled some wonderful farming areas, with fast open roads and gentle hills. It didn’t take that long, only three and a half hours riding, but we stretched it out by stopping to take photos and video. We seemed to have chanced upon it just at the time when all the butterflies in New Zealand had come out to play and sometimes we were riding through clouds of them. Unfortunately, not all of them made it. We stayed in an ex-nunnery with a train carriage in the garden.



The day before was our day in Te Anau and we took the opportunity to drive to Milford sound to take a boat trip. That was a full day – a big ride through the mountains, through a poorly lit one-way tunnel, along an alluvial plain (part of which is now called Knob’s Flat) and to the sound itself. The boat trip was, in truth, pretty uninteresting. There were numerous waterfalls and the odd dolphin, but the main feature was the sheer fjordlikeyness of it all. The ride there and back made it worthwhile though. It was as we waited for the aforementioned tunnel to allow us entry on the way back that we had our Kea encounter. These highly intelligent little mountain parrots now number around five thousand in total and they are fearless vandals. We stopped beside a car where one was on its roof, attacking the straps holding their surfboards. This is a favourite ploy, along with ripping out windscreen seals and tearing off hubcaps. If they were a little less curious they might have a better chance of survival. We headed back to Te Anau, stopped at the Chasm, yomped up Marians Walkway, and after all that went straight to the bottle shop for a litre of Tanqueray 10 and eight tins of Tonic. We became more popular with our companions henceforth.



Which takes me back to where I left off on the last blog entry. On the morning we left Cardrona for Te Anau, I got up in time to watch a flawless stream of the Carabao Cup final, and to watch City maul a frankly pathetic Arsenal. So no surprises there, then. What was a surprise was learning that Tom had managed to T-Bone a Chinese tourist’s car the day before and had put his BMW GS1200 out of action – he was now relegated to the tour bus until a RT1100 turned up in Clyde (when it did, he wondered if he wouldn’t actually just prefer to stay on the bus). And Etay and Nilli, (the Israeli Silicon Vallyers) had got blown off their bike on a hairpin bend in that hooly we experienced in Glenorchy. So our trip in the 4x4 had seemed the safest bet.



We had a great ride down to Te Anau, along Lake Wakatipu, hanging a right at Five Rivers, on to Mossburn and then heading west. Not much to say about it, really, that hasn’t already been said. Because that is what New Zealand is all about – you take something brilliant and then just add more of it until you are overwhelmed by it all. If it wasn’t for Gin I’m not sure how I would cope.

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