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Monday
Jan182010

Kia Ora

While I was out the Great Ocean Road in Victoria I met a 67 year old English guy who had spent five months biking New Zealand a few years ago. He is one of those people who doesn’t believe in marriage or kids. He does have a lady friend of 27 years although they live in separate houses in North Wales. The freedom he enjoys allows him to spend five months touring on a bike every other year and having biked all over both North and South Island I was happy to let him plan my route. My original intention was to go from Christchurch to Queenstown but he suggested going the other way as the winds along the West coast would be more favourable.  He told me that New Zealand is all good but the way he went it just got better and better. Thus, with the relatively short time I have here my route is as follows: Fly into Queenstown and do some mountain-biking, take a bus tour to Milford Sound, ride to Wanaka and chill out, bike out and back to the bottom of Mount Cook (NZ’s highest point but you can't bike up it), head out the west coast to Fox and Franz Josef Glacier and on up to Greymouth before finally biking over Arthur’s Pass to Christchurch for my flight back to Sydney.

I am conscious that this is my last bit of travel in the land of familiar white-folk for a while (maybe colonisation by the crown isn’t so bad ... oops, how could I forget the 700 years yadda yadda yadda) and so my main priority in New Zealand is just to slow things right down to absolute holiday mode and relax as much as possible. The only effort I intend to make is in trying to learn some Latin American Spanish in advance of the next leg of the trip. At some point I will have to engage the brain and check over all my gear and equipment to make some deletions and additions in light of the potential challenges of the Andes. New Zealand provides few headaches in this department as they have good outdoor and bike shops in case you are short. They also have heaps of cheap hostels, which means that there is no point in carting my camping gear. Thus, I am travelling relatively light here.

Go-Go-Gadget holiday mode

marco

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