More from down under

Erupting mud-blurb in the Waiotapu thermal area

I finished up my last post with the image of a rainbow over Hawkes Bay, in Napier. It was a good omen. That day--it was Sunday--the forecast had been for 100% rain most of the day, thanks to cyclone Wutip that had brought iffy or worse weather to New Zealand for more than 10 days. But somehow I escaped all the nastiness and it wasn't until shortly after I had taken that photo that the pounding of the rain began. And the next day dawned bright and clear, and it stayed like that for the remainder of my trip.

The various faces of the landscape as experienced during a short 4-mile walk at the Blue Spring

In an hour and a half my AirBnB host will shuttle me to the AKL airport and I will start the long one-day trip. It'll be a bit weird--not leaving summer for winter, once again--but rather starting the trip on this Monday, crossing the dateline, and arriving 24 hours later while it is still Monday.

As it turned out, it was actually backward time travel!

That's not the only thing that will require a little bit of adjustment: Giving up the carefree campervan life has already given me a bit of withdrawal symptoms. I really have to say that renting a vehicle and living in it for a fortnight was the perfect way to do what I had intended to do: see and learn about this country from the perspective of the bicycle. I drove the van for 1,453 kilometers (or 903 miles), and I rode my bike for 692 kilometers (430 miles) whilst in New Zealand. How is that for balance?

On a ride in the Waipo district close to Lake Ngaroto

I've had some friends ask me about what the riding is like down here, and let me be clear: It's a mixed bag. The larger roads (state highways) are completely unsuitable for bikes. There's too much traffic, shoulders mostly don't exist aside from a narrow strip of rotten asphalt outside of the white line, often less than a foot wide, and there's road construction everywhere, which narrows lanes even more. Add to that heavy trucks with trailers (either logging vehicles or tankers for milk or gasoline) and it becomes rather unnerving to have to use one of these roads as a connector. I am glad that I read similar comments in some travelers' blogs and decided to not go on a self-contained tour.

But I said it's a mixed bag. Smaller, local roads still quite often have the same very rough chip-and-seal coating that the state highways mostly have, but they are quiet, almost devoid of traffic, and will lead your through beautiful countryside. Inclines often are extremely steep (as are the descents, often with sharp curves) but that also brings with it amazing vistas. I used such roads for my almost daily circuit rides from wherever it was that I set up camp. My Locus map program was invaluable in mapping out looping itineraries so that I didn't get lost too often or for too long. This program's algorithms will choose bike friendly routes, be it dedicated cycling paths or simply less-traveled roads. Check it out; I've now used Locus in five or more countries.

So, riding a road bike is fraught with some issues; riding a mountain bike (off-road, that is) must be a completely different deal. Various regions are criss-crossed with mountain bike trails, and locals and tourists alike come here for the quality of the trails. Rotorua was the site of the 2006 UCI Mountain Bike World Championships, and that left the area with bike parks and trails galore. For what it's worth, mountain biking is huge here, as are hiking and walking. You could spend a lifetime exploring all the different trails in just a small portion of the country. Walking is simply part of the (British) culture. Being outdoors is part of it, too, and the large number of campervans that are not rentals but are privately Kiwi-owned attests to New Zealanders' love for camping.

Freedom campsites--those that can be used free of charge for a night or two, sometimes three, if you have a certified self-contained camper--abound. I did not pay a penny for my overnight camping, and almost all of the sites that I called home for a night were scenic and always right on the sea, a lake, or a river. Most of them featured public toilets, which without fail were clean, well stocked with toilet paper, and never smelly. Local councils or civic groups maintain these sites, and my thanks go out to those various rowing clubs or towns that welcome freedom campers on their property. None of these sites allow tent camping, which can only be done in commercial campgrounds--once again, my decision to use a van instead of lugging a tent and all the other stuff on my bike was the right one.

The joys of camping, and some of my neighbors

And one more thing about the logistics of this trip. If you should decide to go to New Zealand and go for a similar trip with a rental van, be prepared for steep gas prices. The price came to be more than US $6.00 per gallon, and these vans are not exactly kings of fuel economy. I spent about US $250 on gas for those less than a thousand miles of driving. But it is what it is...

New Zealand is a large country, and I was just on the North Island. And of this North Island, I didn't see either its northern or most of its central and southern parts. I don't feel as if I missed out on anything since two weeks is a relatively short time and I didn't just want to drive and drive. As I said earlier, I think I struck a good balance. If anything, the choice to limit windshield time will give me several good reasons to come back for more trips. After all, it's just money, isn't it?

My approximate itinerary with camps indicated

What really struck me in those two weeks on the road is the vast diversity of the countryside that New Zealand has to offer. Just on one short walk or riding loop one can see endless pastures, beautiful streams, mountain ranges, wetlands, drylands. Those travel brochures are no exaggeration: New Zealand is a scenic gem. Forget about all the bungee jumping, jet-boat rides, and zipline adventures and concentrate on what's the main attraction out here: Mother Nature. On one of my rides, for example, starting at Lake Taupo (where, incidentally, Ironman New Zealand was taking place a few days later--you may remember my days as Chief Ref for the WTC) I went to the Thermal Discovery Center, where on a mile-long easy loop I saw the earth steaming and vents emanating the stench of rotten eggs. With the laser thermometer that came with the entry fee you can even take temperature readings from a safe distance! Similarly impressive were some of the other thermal locations that I visited.

Or take waterfalls. OMG, I have never seen more gurgling, cascading water than in New Zealand. I'm not sure why practically every stream looks crystal clear, without sediment. I did learn that optical purity of the water is responsible for the deep blue and green appearance of water, thanks to the filtering out of the red spectrum. Yep, I do read the interpretive panels that the DOC (Department of Conservation) installs. The water that leaves Lake Taupo through a narrow gorge is, well, simply frightening in its power. The much more secluded Okere Falls are still being used by rafting companies but maintain their more intimate character. The beauty of riding a bike is that you hear water by the side of the road; that doesn't happen in a car.

Is all well in New Zealand? I don't quite think so. There appear underlying frictions between the native Maori population and the descendants of the British invaders, not to even touch on immigration issues having to do with Chinese and Indian nationals. Housing prices have exploded in the major population areas such as Auckland and Wellington (although in podunk little places rather decent homes can be bought for money that one might pay in Lubbock for a similar place--but gees, you'd really be far out!). The country recently has experienced several severe droughts thanks to global climate change, and once sea levels are going to rise to the predicted levels there will be a lot of property that you can buy cheaply, if you're ready to be under water! Overgrazing appears to be an issue, and loss of habitat because of population growth is not under control, from what I read. The current government seems to not be well respected by those who try to apply a bigger picture, similar to what we see in the US. So, no, not all is peachy-creamy fine in paradise.

But of course one doesn't go to New Zealand to worry about politics. Without throwing my money (and better bring a tidy wadful of it) at every tourist attraction, I spent some of it on those things I really wanted to see--and, no, that's not only the dozen or so craft breweries and several wineries that I visited.

One of the highlights (of course, there were so many this statement is kinda dumb) was my visit to three of the Waitomo caves. You may have heard of the glowworm caves, and there are various different sites in NZL where you can view those not-so-wormy worms. In a nutshell, the glowworm is really the predatory larva (maggot!) of a type of fly that happens to live in caves and other dark places that also feature a wet environment, such as a stream flowing through a cave. The stream carries insects into the cave, they try to escape, and voila, they are attracted by the bioluminescent twinkles that all these maggots create at the ceiling of the caves. The maggots, similar to spiders (thus their Latin moniker Arachnocampa luminosa), have created a large field of sticky strings that dangle down from the ceiling, the insects that flutter up get tangled up, and the larvae kill and feed on them. Larva turns to pupa, pupa hatches into a new fly, there's some propagating going on, and then the cycle starts up again--much to the delight of visitors from all over the world.

Look very closely--you can actually see the blue glowworm lights in the last pic

I have to admit, descending into these caves and seeing the lights of hundreds of thousands of these maggots twinkle like the stars in a distant galaxy is stunning. I've never seen anything as other-world and beautiful as that. The guides who take you through the caves are local Maori who obviously respect the environment and the land, and even though this is a huge tourist attraction (about 1,500 visitors a day) measures have been taken to mitigate the effects of having that many visitors enter the caves. Man, that was the experience of a lifetime, and I'm glad that my itinerary happened to bring this attraction at the end of the trip.

At the end of the visit, tourists leave the cave via boat

So, those were the almost two weeks in a campervan on the North Island of New Zealand. I returned my Rover to the Lucky rental place without much fanfare on Saturday and then used Sunday for one final, long ride around the bays of Auckland. I kept grinning at all those little idiosyncrasies that I had noticed over the course of my stay, such as the use for "trundler" for a shopping cart or that a corner convenience store is called a "dairy." I kept being amazed by the cycling and general outdoor infrastructure that Auckland features, with "Farm Parks" in the middle of the city, rowing clubs galore, beautiful bike and walking paths, and "reserve" after reserve to allow people to enjoy nature--in one they even had free public gas grills, for your barbecuing pleasure on a Sunday afternoon. And please, feel free to use the well-maintained public restrooms. Very, very liveable, indeed.

So, now I'm in the Qantas lounge right before my flight home. I feel incredibly content and happy about this trip as it was much more, in inexplicable ways, than what I had expected. It all came together perfectly, every little piece of the puzzle. It'll be hard to replicate this superior vacation, but I also know that I will try to do so when I come back next time. There's way too much to see!

Jürgen