2/15/07

Finally down into fruit country and out of the gorge.  Fruit stands selling, apricots, plums, pears and cherries accompany us into Cromwell, the small town servicing the surrounding valleys.  Tonight we are back into our tent looking forward staring the Otago Rail Trail tomorrow.

1.Cromwell 2. Dunston reservoir 3.Clyde

 

2/16/07

Cromwell to Clyde is 23km of beautiful highway hugging the canyon wall overlooking the Dunston Reservoir.  This area was flooded by the installation of the dam above Clyde and drowned what was then known as the best apricot growing area in NZ.  Gold and orchards dominate the central Otago area with the advent recently of vineyards/wineries and bicyclists to ride the rail trail.

 

Clyde is a picturesque quaint little hamlet with one main street fronted with early 1900’s cottages of local schist, a few churches, hotels and new restaurants.  We asked at the hotel for a cup of coffee.  “Mary, down the street at the general store makes the best cup in town.”  Off to see Mary for two “long blacks” in the garden sunshine.  Seems the place is for sale and Mary would like to move on, maybe to Wanaka.  Judee spoke to the host of the Hartley Arms backpacker’s establishment and he suggested we take the river trail rather than the rail trail down to Alexandra – 13km.

 

OK, off we go down the road, across the river on the red bridge and down the on to the single track trail.  If you have never ridden a loaded tandem that can not coast, up and down, around, over, and through the trees, gravel, sand, rocks, over narrow bridges, through stiles, you have not lived!  The low riders catch, turns are made for single bikes and walkers.  All of this managed through a tunnel of over hanging tees.  We lunch with legs hanging off the bank over the river and a group of cycle tourists staying in Clyde pass by us using their rest day to explore the local area.  In places we push the bike over long bridges, short ones we ride timidly hoping not to snag the low riders and topple into the creek below.  We smile and laugh because this will be a short day of only 43 k.  we have decided to relax and kick back for the next few days. We come upon the bridge over the river and into Alexandra and see we will have to push Bici up the very steep and rocky access path.  Huff and puff up to the road and across the bridge, down into town to the information center, museum and art gallery. After getting directions to our campground and the grocery store, we explore and walk the town garden.  What magnificent roses of every shade and hue: pink, white, red, yellow, simples and doubles.  Oh what music for our noses and brilliance for our eyes.

Octago Rail Trail

 

Our campground sits next to a swiftly flowing small river, cold but very wade-able.  Local boys with their energetic dog, use the rope swing, plopping, laughing and screaming into the cool depths; then off to climb on the schist outcropping in the warm later afternoon sun. Dinner tonight is steaks on the Barbie and potatoes accompanied by a green salad with bread.  Yummy.

 

2/17/07 

A rail trail day, bright sunny, no clouds predicted with temps of around 28 degrees [Editorial comment from Gary:  that's obviously 28 centigrade degrees and nicely warm; have A and J gone fully cosmo and lost their Fahrenheit roots?] and easterly winds.  We laze around in our tent and roll out around 10am.  The trail is an old railroad grade recently in the last five years turned into a hike and bike trail.  The railroad serviced the central Otago area, bringing fruit, livestock and produce to market in Dunedin on the Pacific coast.  Today part of the track is still used for tourist runs and we will be taking this train in a few days, but for now we are riding on the old road bed.  Our goal is about 60km out though the gorges and numerous broad framing valleys.  We are surprised by the numbers of cyclists who pass us going the other way: 20 plus, some locals, but foreign tourists also.  We stopped to share stories with three young men on loaded bikes, two French and one German.  They had been touring the entire island and only had a few days left before returning to their home lands.

 

Riding on the gravel surface was tiring and stressful.  Bici bounced all over with a mind of his own at times.  The gradient was not steep just continuously up for many kilometers, then a long bouncy down.  Hill sides were dotted with block schist out-croppings that reminded me of the rock formations in the Black Hills of South Dakota, USA.  The surrounding mountains are burned a dark orange and it feels like late August in the western US.  It gets quite hot as we spin up the long grades even with our slight tail wind.  In the afternoon, we stop when we find shade covering the trail, eat some cookies, drink our water and talk to the sheep and cows.  Just 1k out of the town of Oturehua we come across a sign for the Hayes Engineering Works.  What an interesting place.  Mr. Hayes was a very practical inventor of everyday things to help make ranch and station life better:  windmills, water pumps, fittings for fence wire and fence wire stretchers, rolling pine with blades to cut poison blocks to kill rabbits and on and on.  The Works started in 1895 and was out grown in 1952 when they moved to Christchurch where it flourishes today.

 

1. Hayes Enginering wire stretchers 2.Camp in the woods beside the trail

 

Hot and sweaty, we move onto the town and find the Crow’s Nest backpackers, put up a tent, shower, siit and have a beer, then go off down the street to the Tavern for a great dinner.  This is a one horse village: less than one hundred people including  the surrounding ranches.  It is clean and tidy as usual for NZ!

 

We read after dinner in the common area of the Crow’s Nest while the other family with two boys, 7 and 10 years, cooked s'mores just outside the window.  In bed, the sounds of sheep, dogs and cows lulled us to sleep.  Later, up for a bathroom trip, I stood amazed at the Milky Way and heavenly stars: they do twinkle, diamonds on black velvet!

 

2/18/07 

More rail trail; up over the highest point, 618m, in the bright sunshine with a cool tail wind into the Art Deco town of Ranfurly.  We enjoy lunch and make train reservations for Tuesday.  We end our day in the woods above the Taieri River, setting up the tent about 50 yards off the trail in a secluded area.  What an ideal setting among huge pines, chirping birds with no sound of civilization.  How unique!  After skinny dipping in the river to get the trail dust of, we settle in to read, write and prepare dinner.  “Does it get any better than this?” as our friend Dan would say.  No way! 

 

Snippets

• One day riding across the south island toward Dunedin passing through the fruit country and roadside fruit stands, a man came out of a stand holding out a bag of cherries for us.  He stuffed them in the handle bar bag mesh pocket as we rode by saying “This is love from Alaska.”  We hollered Thanks and rode on.
• One night when we were camping, we were awakened by a tussling noise just outside our tent and into our gear.  Judee popped up “Art, get me a light”.  Zip goes the tent door and we look for what was making the noise.  Nothing viable until we start moving the bags.  A spiky, specked brown and gray ball: a hedgehog!  We shove things at it and poke but the ball stays balled and we roll it out from under the rain fly and into the night.  Morning comes and the hedge hog is gone, much more frightened of us than we of him!
• NZ is clean and green.  When we visited the Milford Sound National Park this cleanliness really came home to us.  When we boarded our tour bus, the driver reminded us that what we carry in we must bring out.  Twenty to thirty buses roll into this huge park each summer day, stop at Kodak Moments with four or five other buses at bathroom spots, and for 20 minute hikes to the waterfalls where we have to wait in line to see the falls, but there is no litter. There are no trash cans!  The roadsides are clean!  What is right with this picture?  What a contrast to Mexico, Central and South America where trash and litter cover the hillsides and dumps announce that you are about to enter or leave a town or city.  What, no plastic buses, trees or gardens?  The name of the game in NZ is recycle and teaching everyone to respect the environment.  Once again: how civilized! 

2/19/07 

We wake to the birds chirping, river rushing, and quiet.  So we roll over and snuggle for another half hour and at 8:30 I get up to run to the toilet then start the water for our coffee.  Sitting on the ground eating our cereal and yogurt, munching orange slices and looking down the hill through the large pine to watch the river flow by we feel every day and night should be this peaceful.

 

Shallow overcast with patches of blue green, as we cycle down the trial to Hyde where we find the marvelous Otago Central Café and Hotel and lots of other cyclist stopped for morning tea and coffee.  This place is really upscale: claw foot bath tubs, step up plush beds with canopies.  From Hyde it is basically down hill to Middlemarch: the end of the rail trail.  We get in around 1pm and have a meat loaf slathered in home made mustard accompanied by pasta and vegetable mix with our Speight’s beer all done in a garden setting at the Kissing Gate Café.  They grow their own herbs and spices and have an unusual menu to choose from: rollups, quiches and salads. 

 

Tonight we eat pasta and sauce cooked in our kitchen ( a caboose) at Blind Billy’s’ Holiday Park.  Bici got watered off to try and remove some of the dirt and grime accumulated over the last four days of trail riding and Judee washed our panniers and clothes.  The campground and village is set in an open broad valley that could easily be mistaken for the hills of Kansas.  Today the bright sun was very hot, but cool in the shade on the deck outside the caboose where I sit writing with a 360 degree view of the valley.  We had a good headwind all the ride down but it made for quick drying of our laundry this late afternoon.

1.Hotel 2.cabose

 

Tomorrow at 4pm we catch the train out of Pukerangi 21k up the dirt road.  After breakfast we plan on getting in some internet time to catch up the journal.  We walked around to the house with the only internet connection to find a note on the door saying “call this number and I’ll come open up.”  We found out later down the street that the woman who runs one unit was out of town until after 1 pm – so no internet today.

 

2/20/07 

Lunch again at the Kissing Gate Café and off into the sunshine 21k to Pukerangi.  The morning thick fog has burnt off and the sky is blue and dotted with white puff balls as we ride through the ranch/station country down the valley.  The road has little traffic and soon we leave the sealed surface for 6k of gravel.  We start to see formations of schist popping up all over the hillsides, grey and black mounds grow into large outcropping with all kinds of shapes and silhouettes.  We start to see lions crouching, hawks spring into the air, outlines of faces in these rocks.  Up ahead the sealed road is visible, winding very steeply up and up the mountain to the highest lookout point over 600m.  Once again we shift down to the granny and start the long grind to the top.  Sweat pouring down as we pass abandoned farmsteads and old mining claims, winding, winding, the birds calling to us along with a few pesky horsefly’s waiting to taste our flesh.  Over the top and onto the gravel for the last 2k to the train station. 

 

No one is around when we arrive, and empty small building outhouses and farm houses can be seen in the distance.  At one end of the building we slide open the heavy door to find a small room with bench and pictures of the railroads history lining the walls.  We read our books for almost an hour when five large buses arrived.  They are shuttling passengers to Queenstown.  Our train arrives, 200 get off, and 75 get on.  A bus comes ½ hour late filled with Asian passengers, so off we go down the Tragi River Gorge, through ten tunnels, across 15 trestles hugging the canyon wall, catching glimpses of the river below the huge granite walls.  We roll into Dunedin ½ hour late at 7pm, load Bici and start looking for a backpacker bed.  The first one and [the?] sister hotel are fully booked.  Riding further into town we are met by hundreds of college students dressed in white togas and caring bottles, winding through the street making merry.  Judee uses the street phone booth to try calling around for a room.  No luck, the city has No Vacancy, so we end up at a Holiday Park campground in our tent and wondering around at 9:15pm looking for a place to eat.  After a 30minute walk, found a great pizza place over looking the Pacific and had an outstanding pizza and beer.  Got back to our tent around 11pm and read until midnight before we turned off our lights.

1. Winding UP! 2.Here comes the train 3. Inside the train

 

2/21/07 

Today is filled with questions pertaining to our upcoming air journey to Australia: What to do with Bici and the panniers?  Take them to Christchurch? Leave them here in Dunedin?  Do we have to box Bici? How do we get all this stuff 30k out to the airport?  After many phone calls, we have a plan.  The guys at the airport fire station will keep Bici and panniers until we arrive back here on March 2 to fly back to Christchurch.  So we will ride out to the airport and discuss with them how we have to prepare Bici for the flight.

 

Getting out of Dunedin is not easy.  There is a reason it is known as the hilliest city in NZ.  Also we can find no roads other than the Motorway (expressway) and No Bicycles signs as we attempt to get out of town.  We work our way up to the Motorway and ride the shoulder for 20km out into the country where it turns into a normal highway.  Only a few people shouted at us from their speeding cars.  Out in dairy land it was a nice final 10k into the airport.  The Air NZ gal said we only have to cover the chains and we may have to take Bici’s front off to meet the size restriction of the small plane to Christchurch.  The men at the fire station greeted us warmly and one even offered us a place to stay at this house if we needed it!  We left Bici and bags in good hand and repaired to the terminal to wait for our shuttle back to town.

 

We are now normal tourists: staying in a regular hotel room (no other accommodation is available in the city of Dunedin, particularly now that we are tent less).  We ate dinner out and will be touring by bus to Christchurch 2/23.  Our son, his wife and our 5 year old grandson will fly in on the 25th and we will meet them with a car.  Already the difference in effort between cycling and tenting to riding in vehicles, living in rooms with in suite bathrooms, and eating at restaurants is evident to us.  Living is much simpler, but we really prefer the “sporting” life!