2000 Biking New Zealand
…at the end
5 & 6 January 2001, Friday &
Saturday
Pukenui – Sydney – Johannesburg
On the morning of the 5th our host’s
son-in-law drove us to the Kaitaia airport just outside Awanui to get our
flight to Auckland.
Drove us along 90 Mile Beach. On hard-packed sand much used by tourists and
locals alike. Provided you have easy access to the beach, it is far faster to
travel along it than along the road. We picked up a shell, stopped to look at a
freshly-caught pinkish shark – its eyes already plucked out by birds, took a
photo.
We were a little taken aback by the size of
the airport, and even more so by the fact that it was closed! We were way too
early, it seems. Chatted to some locals there to meet a private plane. And to a
brash Afrikaner, with nothing positive to say about New
Zealand, visiting from America a sister who had chosen to
live in this quiet spot. At last a man arrived. Who took tickets and booked
seats and weighed luggage; unpacked the 18-seater when it arrived; and
re-packed it before it left. Charl had to help him squeeze our bikes into the
luggage compartment (he too had said we were crazy to expect there to be room
for bikes on a plane this size during the holidays – and he too was scathing
about us saying we had booked the bikes on board, saying that bags had
precedence) – in fact, had to take off a tyre to achieve our goal. We had
foolishly watched the first passengers walking out to the plane, subconsciously
awaiting an intercom call. But boarded in time – Charl making the passengers
laugh by saying it was not often one got to sit in both a window and an aisle
seat at the same time!
We had a three-hour wait in Auckland for our flight to Sydney. And a good trip across to that hot
and humid city. Where the ‘fragile-goods’ conveyer belt simply and unbelievably
dumped fragile goods off the one end!
Michelle and Jon were there to meet us. And
drove us to friends for dinner and bed via the harbour with its bridge and
opera house – quite a sight on a lovely night. The friends were great company,
the food delicious, our room a delightful museum with a mishmash of fascinating
articles hung in the rafters.
We spent the Saturday with Michelle, her
kids Dominique and Jackson, and the friends’ daughter. Being driven around Sydney – to both Charl and I immediately more appealing,
more liveable than any New
Zealand city – criss-crossing the harbour by
ferry, and visiting the zoo (best animal – the koala). ‘Home’ for something to
eat and to collect Jon (they were driving home after dropping us), to Kanga
House to collect the goods we had been given for Leon
when we flew into Sydney from Perth in December, and out to the airport for
gentle goodbyes. Great to see Michelle again – especially looking happier than
when I last saw her. And to meet her family.
And so…home!
[Join us in South Africa...]
[See current and previous trips here...]
Appendix 1
TO: Coleman Andrews, CEO, South African
Airways
22 January 2001
Dear Sir
In late-2000 Voyager member Leon Louw
(121449) ceded some of his then-270 000 Miles to Charl
Heydenrych and myself for a trip to New Zealand. As
your Voyager members are your best clients I looked forward to booking my trip
– assuming I would get good service. The opposite proved to be the case,
however, both with Voyager and SAA.
Firstly, getting a date of your choice is
an incredibly tedious and painfully bureaucratic process. It seems you have to
request a date and call back several days later to find out whether or not it
is available. If not, you get to try another date and wait again and try again.
It literally took me weeks to finalise our dates. Surely there must be a better
way.
Once our dates were booked, I put in a
request for a certificate (see attached), waited the obligatory two weeks,
called (having to hold for ages as usual) to confirm, and was told we could
collect the tickets at the airport. We spent a good 20 minutes in the queue and
over an hour at the counter as it was here we discovered that the Kaitaia to Auckland leg of our trip
had not in fact been confirmed. Several phone calls and much tapping on the
computer keyboard later our tickets were finally issued. At this point I paid
R656 in airport taxes and was assured this would cover all the airports (see
6). [May I suggest a better queuing system – bearing in mind that some of the
people behind me stood there for over an hour? A machine that issues a number,
a couple of couches, perhaps free coffee.]
As we were going on a cycling trip we
subsequently called SAA and Air New Zealand to
check procedures for carrying our bikes. Depending on who we spoke to at SAA we
were given a variety of procedures ranging from having to pay R250 per bike
each way (ie R1000 in all), to being told that provided the bikes were within
our baggage weight limit (which they were), and provided we streamlined them
(which we did), and provided we let the airline know beforehand (which we did),
we could simply wheel them through on the day of our departure (see 4).
When we called Air New Zealand to check
their requirements, it was to be told that the Kaitaia to Auckland leg of our trip had not in fact been
confirmed! In addition, we were told that the flight was fully booked. Seems
someone took a shortcut when issuing the ticket! Resolving this issue was a
lengthy nightmare. Finally, we had to change the date and therefore spend one
less night in Sydney en route to Johannesburg, and were told to update the ticket on
arrival in New Zealand.
You’ll probably find this hard to believe, but when we tried to do this we
found that only one of us had been confirmed on the new date! Luckily the Air
New Zealand official agreed to put me into a non-concession seat.
Come departure date we arrived at
Johannesburg International with our streamlined bikes to be told we had to pay
R500! It took us nearly an hour to resolve this issue to our satisfaction as
everyone we spoke to had a different view on the issue.
We then asked if we could check our baggage
all the way to Invercargill or not and were told it was no problem and happily
boarded our plane with only hand luggage to see us through our one night
stopover in Sydney.
Seems one cannot in fact book luggage through – it has to go through customs in
Australia.
Luckily a curious official at Sydney
airport asked how come we had so little luggage with us. Had he not, we would
have gotten on the plane to New Zealand
on the following morning and found later that our bikes and panniers were
sitting in storage in Sydney.
On leaving Auckland
we had to pay NZ$44 in airport tax – an amount we had been told was covered by
the R656 we paid in Johannesburg
(see 2).
We also discovered that we had been
pre-assigned seats (a first for me) at opposite ends of the plane as our
tickets did not show we were travelling together.
Some of the above points would have been
relatively minor irritations had they not happened in conjunction with the
others; some were major problems.
I hope to hear from you soon in this
regard.
Request for certificate to be issued
Please issue a certificate for the
following flights:
CM Heydenrych – RCM3R7; GI Day – RIM2S3
SA280 Johannesburg-Sydney Dec 5 19h50-19h00
NZ182 Sydney-Christchurch
Dec 7 09h35-14h45
NZ5009 Christchurch-Invercargill
Dec 7 18h05-19h20
NZ2609 Kaitaia-Auckland Jan 4 12h45-13h45
NZ107 Auckland-Sydney Jan 4 18h00-19h30
SA281 Sydney-Johannesburg Jan 6 21h30-05h30
Voyager member: Leon M Louw, 121449,
4803185041004
Thanks.
Appendix 2
Not quite Bluff to Cape Reinga
on two wheels
Not much happens in this story. A fat woman
and her friend decide to cycle from Bluff to Cape Reinga
– and don’t quite make it.
OK – so I am not your average cyclist. I am
43, weigh well over 100kg, and just a few months back would be out of breath
after facing and conquering the daunting challenge of a flight of stairs. I am
also afraid of falling. Which means I brake on descents, take corners in an
upright position and avoid unsealed roads. No athlete I. And yet I made the
decision to cycle the 2 500km between Bluff and Cape Reinga;
and persuaded Charl to join me. En route we had to contend with aching butts
and hands and knees; we philosophised with gentle folk, delightful cynics, and
closet racists; we became intimate with New Zealand’s rain forests and
mountains and weather patterns; and we had to answer the question: At what
point does it make more sense to give up than to go on? In the end the answer
was simple – when it is physically impossible to go on.
Time constraints dictated our route and
daily distances and from Day One we were disturbingly aware that we might well
have bitten off more than we could chew. We left Bluff in good spirits despite
an icy breeze, bound for Lumsden 120km north. For the bulk of the day we cycled
in a vast unassuming valley interspersed with the odd hill, soon conquered.
Cycled toward snow-peaked mountains distant and pale against bleached blue.
Past trees with backs bent to the prevailing wind. Past deer with startled eyes
and ears pricked high. Past lamb on the spit, lamb chops, lamb kebabs, roast
lamb…a-graze in pastures green. Past hens a-peck on a rural lawn; and whimsical
gardens; and roadside flowers in butter yellow and mustard. And arrived in
Lumsden with energy only to consume a large meal and climb the stairs leg-weary
to our room to sleep still travel-stained.
In the days that followed we grew to love
the South Island despite our increasing
exhaustion. From Lumsden into foothills and along the shores of lovely Lake Wakatipu
to Queenstown; over the 1100m-high Crown
Range via the Cardrona pub to Wanaka
for our first rest day; along Lakes Hawea and Wanaka into the farmed and
rain-forested Makarora valley; and over Haast Pass
to Haast.
During the next two days – a long one to
Fox Glacier, a short one to Franz Josef Glacier – it rained, but these proved
to be our only inclement days in the south. Where we expected wet weather we
often found ourselves cycling instead in a burgeoning bludgeoning heat – hot
enough on some days to turn the tar beneath our tyres to treacle.
North to Ross where the revived gold
industry now employs all of 12 people; and onward to Punakaiki and its pancake
rocks. Where we sat in a hot tub overlooking the Tasman and sipped Cognac from our hip flask
in preparation for our longest day – a day which tested us almost to our limits
– 140-shattering km and 14 hours to Murchison. Further east then to St Arnaud;
north again to cosmopolitan Nelson; over Whangamoa and Rai Saddles (7km and 6km
climbs respectively) to tiny Havelock – dubbed
the “Green-lipped Mussel Capital of the World” and after sampling the mussels
we felt perhaps it had earned the title; and finally to Picton for the ferry
trip across Cook Strait.
On the North Island
things fell apart – predominantly for two reasons: We had cycled over 1200
tough km from Bluff in just 15 days and were physically spent; and the dramatic
increase in fast-moving and sometimes terrifying traffic combined with gusting
winds and hilly terrain sapped our dwindling reserves to nil. So on a wet and
windy Xmas morning with 140km planned across the Desert Road from Taihape (reached in two
gruelling days from Wellington)
to Taupo, we hitched instead – bikes ‘n all – a ride with Alex the painter. And
lunched well and rested some and tried to find a way to deal with our
ambivalent thoughts: sorry to have failed, happy not to be out there fighting
the elements.
On a bike sights are seen in unavoidably
graphic detail. Dead birds and rabbits and possums by the hundred: the
long-dead splat flat and sometimes skunk-striped by the road-marking brigade;
the recently-dead reeking and fly-encrusted; the newly-dead wetly red. Try not
to look, try not to breathe (difficult on a slow incline), try not to remember
that any one of the speeding vehicles too close beside your vulnerable hide can
reduce you in an instant to the same mangled mess. Try not to imagine your
family placing fresh flowers beside a poignant roadside cross in the festive
season. Take a traffic-free back road to Rotorua and be thankful for the
shoulder most of the way to Cambridge.
When the shoulder disappears, get off the saddle and walk. Avoid the killing
zone by taking a train into Auckland
and a bus to Waipu.
Then back on the bikes for the last four
glorious days to the Cape. On New Year’s
morning a late night and the Waipu Highland Games delayed our departure to such
an extent we only arrived in pretty Paihia after dark. But on a fine blue-sky
day en route to tiny Kaeo, we cycled along the bay and up over the hill past
the golf course and back onto Route 10 past bamboo windbreaks creaking in a
gentle breeze and curious cows hurrying to Charl’s piercing whistle. And the
following day through charming Mangonui to Awanui and beyond to Pukenui. Where
we encountered an odd sign declaring “Unlocked cars are contributing to the
increased crime rate”. Mmmm…and here we thought criminals alone increased
crime!
On our last day we had 70km to cover to
reach Cape Reinga and its lighthouse and arose
filled with nostalgia to complete our incompleteable journey. The first 50km
took four hours; the last 20 three-and-a-half hours. We cycled at first on a
smooth sealed road quiet enough to hear cows chomping and birds and bugs
chattering. And later on a dirt road from hell resounding with the
engine-sounds of straining 4x4s and tour buses. We cycled with white dunes on
our right and golden dunes on our left. Northwest along what is essentially a
sand spit wearing green to a peninsula where two oceans meet.
When we asked others mulling around the
lighthouse base to take the obligatory photos of us standing dusty and tired
under a signpost showing crow-fly distances to far-flung places, our odometer
read 2 000km. Quite an achievement – in fact all we could manage – but not
quite what we’d hoped. Was it tough? Yes. Did I ask myself what the hell I was
doing almost every day? Yes. Would I do it again? Yes. Why? At the top of the Crown Range
on Day Three we had met a young man who had cycled the 40-uphill km from Wanaka
“just for fun”. When I said I thought he was mad, he looked at my bike and I
with raised eyebrows and asked the inevitable: “So what’s your excuse?” Even on
this our last day I had not been able yet to distil an answer from my muddled
thoughts: A midlife crisis? An antidote to boredom? A need to do something
drastic to slow the slide into total unfitness? Sublimation for the childbirth
I’ll never experience? Because, as in everyday life, it is just as important to
set a challenging goal and work toward it as to achieve it? Or maybe something
altogether simpler? Because, even if only in retrospect, the pain is outweighed
by the pleasure.
Gail Day
(Charl Heydenrych)