(Paerora, New Zealand, 14th of January 2017)
We started this morning by taking the ferry to the mainland and then continued cycling the longest bike ride hitherto.
120 kilometer and 1341 meters of altitude my Garmin Computer told me by the end of the day. No less than three mountains were climbed and the first two were considerably nicer than the last one, also if all three of them had parts that were so steep that it was difficult to keep the momentum. The third mountain was probably not really worse than the first two, but when you start to get tired, everything becomes a snap worse.
(Whitianga, New Zealand, 13th of January 2017)
One of the things we planned during our rest day yesterday was today’s trip to “Hot water beach” and “Cathedral Cave” with a small bus. In the morning we took a small ferry across from Whitianga to the mainland, where we found our little shuttle bus.
The driver of our bus must be a big fan of “near death experiences” as the bus journey was anything but quiet and peaceful. In New Zeeland, you often get to drive 100 km / h, no matter how narrow or bumpy the road is and this was something our driver really had embraced.
(Whitianga, New Zealand, 12th of January 2017)
A day off to plan for future trips. So nice to just lie in bed a whole day and read maps, guidebooks, cycling stories on the web, and other useful information. The only thing we did “in the real world” was to go for a short walk.
/ Christel
(Whitianga, New Zealand, 11th of January 2017)
We woke up to a gray sad morning with drizzle and gray clouds. We had breakfast consisting of sandwhiches with parmesan cheese, vegetables and nutella (not at the same time) and some cold potato with salt and then decided to wait a little before we started today’s trip. The distance we had planned to ride was only 36 km long, across to the other coast of Coromandel Peninsula and the city of Whitianga, and it was supposed to be only one mountain to climb.
At nine o´clock it was still still raining but as we were restless we took off anyway, dressed in our rain jackets.
(Coromandel Town, New Zealand, 10th of January 2017)
Today’s destination was Coromandel – a small town on the west coast of the Peninsula on New Zeeland’s east coast. It was not a very long trip, but we knew that a number of mountains would turn up, and after yesterday’s hardships the planned XNUMX kilometerns felt just enough.
We were served breakfast by our furious hostess at our guesthouse from 8 so we could not get away until around 9 this morning. It was raining a bit but to get to a new place you have to ride your bike, so that is what you do. And once you sit on the bike, everything feels better, also if we said that we would not have been cycling on a day like this if we did not have to.
The first half of the day the road was almost flat and stretched along the coast. Very beautiful but very windy and with our usual luck the wind had turned during the night so we had headwinds just like the day before although we cycled in the opposite direction. Today’s first mountain of just over 2 kilometers felt very easy, although sometimes it was terribly steep.
(Thames, New Zealand, 9th of January 2017)
Luckily we stayed in Kawakawa overnight as the next morning’s bike ride started with a 3 km long bike ride up a mountain, Te Motu Hill. For my part, it was a lot of slalom driving up the hill, it’s hard to run with the luggage on the bike although I have much lighter bags on my bike than Johan has. The slope of the mountain was very often close to 10% which I normally think is quite tough, and with luggage and a fairly untrained body it is definitely not easier.
(Kawakawa Bay, New Zealand, 8th of January 2017)
We had decided to leave Half Moon Bay today but we had no idea how far we would cycle, we thought we could consider this along the way and book a hotel room when we started to feel tired. After the first days fairly easy workouts we thought we should do a tour of around XNUMX kilometers, with the city of Miranda as a goal, but it turned out, especially for me, to be a bit too optimistic.
(Half Moon Bay, New Zealand, 7th of January 2017)
Today we had decided to take our bikes and visit an island off the coast and ride around a bit. The island is called Waiheke, and it is not big but very hilly. The boat departed from the port a few hundred meters from our motel and took 45 minutes across to the island. Along the way we passed several islands and nature shifted really much from island to island. Some consist of large hills with grass in shades from yellow to green and others only of trees.
(Half Moon Bay, New Zealand, 6th of January 2017)
As we fell asleep very early yesterday after a long and tiring trip from Sweden, we woke up already at 04.30 in the morning. But luckily, the Ibishotel we stayed in was serving breakfast already from 5.30 in the morning so that was no problem. Johan assembled the second bike and after donating our bicycle cartons to a nice cleaning lady we packed our stuff together to get out on the roads. Since we are going to ride our bikes all the time in New Zealand we have packed a minimum of things, a total of just over 10 kilos in addition to the valuables we keep in a bag in front of the bar. For example, we have minimal clothes with us like; one pair of pants, two sweaters, one pair of shorts etc. The only thing we have got a lot of is training clothes, bicycle accessories, tools and electrical gadgets.
This first day we had planned a very short trip to test if everything works properly with bags and bikes. The target was Half Moon Bay, 25 km east of the airport. It was a pleasant trip, mainly through some rugged residential areas in the outskirts of Auckland. The sun showed up and the temperature was around 23 degrees. Many small hills up and down but so much to look at that you hardly noticed them. Strange enough, we got associations with US villas when we cycled through the outskirts
(Auckland, New Zealand, 5th of January 2017)
It’s easy to get confused when you travel east and have to move the time forward many hours on a regular basis. Eating at odd times of the day gets quite normal but it is harder to decide when you should be sleeping (or absolutely not sleeping …) to most easily get in phase.
When we arrived in Beijing we had change the time on our whatches 7 hours forward and we stayed there for 7 hours in anticipation of the next flight. The airport was very desolate with unexpected few people and we got a seat on some really comfartable chairs. But oh what we got to fight for not falling asleep, something we did quite well after all. It helped a bit that they had screwed down the room temperature, although it was not very nice, it helped us keeping our eyes open.
Our next flight took us three hours ahead in time and the destination was Sydney. Our bodies now thought that it was 10 in the evening while, in Sydney it was 7 in the morning. A bit difficult to adapt to…
At the airport we had to pick up our luggage and then go through customs in order to check it in again for further transport to Auckland, New Zealand. We have heard many horror stories about the customs in Australia and were prepared to have to pack up our bikes and get our luggage checked. Once we went through customs, they did not at all look at our bikes and just waved through our candy bags we kindly and obediently had declared.
At the airport in Sydney, we spent several tedious hours of waiting for our flight to Auckland. Again, we had to fight to keep us awake as we once again almost succeeded. Dinner in the Italian fast food restaurant resulted in soup, bread and pasta. No culinary experience but pretty good and filling.
We arrived in Auckland at 21.00 o´clock th 5 of January and another two-hour time lag was added to our already confused sense of time. Smartly enough, we had booked a hotel very close to the airport and we could even walk with our luggage carts all the way there. Johan had an active time in the hotel room before bedtime and managed to put together one of our bikes for the following day´s bicycle adventure.
/ Christel
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