How to avoid being eaten by Sheep

(Hi, I'm Josele again... Change of plans... An English couple fished two crayfishes, similar to a lobster, and offered one to us for only 20NZ$, so we could not pass the opportunity and are going to have it for lunch at the Youth Hostel. This means I have time to create the second promised blog entry about yesterday's bike stage).

We started the day a bit later than usual (about 10am) but well rested after our 1-day stay in Hanmer Springs. Our plan was to bike 50km. to Waiau, then decide whether it made sense to keep on cycling to Mount Lyford through the Pacific Alpine Triangle Road, an extra 20km. of hilly terrain.

We were incredibly lucky, and we did our first 50km. helped by a powerful tailwind that allowed us to arrive to Waiau in less than 2 hours!

We daydreamed about continuing to Kaikoura so that we could stay two days there, but we decided it would be too much (it would make a 130km. stage) and that it would be wisest to stay at a lodge in Mount Lyford. We started the ascent to the Mt. Lyford, a total climb of 350 meters, with several annoying 6-7% slopes and arrived at the lodge very tired... Unfortunately for us, the lodge was closed! It turned out it opens mainly during the ski season... The choice had been made for us: we should reach Kaikoura (there was no bar, shop or village between Waiau and Kaikoura except Mt. Lyford)... Fortunately, it was only 2:30pm and, according to our map, we were "only" 61km. from Kaikoura, mostly downhill...

The road was beautiful, full of gentle curves through wooded hills, creeks, and the most terrible predator of the New Zealand wild lands: the sheep!! (insert ominous music here). We had an interesting encounter with a swarm of them:

And I have uploaded to youtube an interesting video in which you can see us helping the shepherd with his sheep (Bikemaggedon style) : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6eqOCIDrik

After 20+ km. (by then we had already biked around 90km.) of legbreaking biking, I started to be annoyed with every short or long uphill section of the road... I would start every climb thinking I would not be able to do it, cursing every single meter of the road, only to grind my teeth and push to my energy limit (probably a similar sensation to what the marathon runners call "The Wall")... The going was slow and painful, the views magnificent and inspiring...

In km. 115 we both stopped exhausted and tried to regain some energy (we had no food and no water by then)... another uphill section loomed on the road, and we felt we would need another hour to finish the trip... Then, after that uphill section, the road went downhill, and downhill, and downhill!!! It was 13km. of joyful ride, at 30kph speeds, so we reached the outskirts of Kaikoura in only 30 minutes... At the entrance of Kaikoura from the south, you have to climb a small 50m. hill... the toughest climb of my life!

We soon found the best Lodge in town, with spa bathtub and great views over the Kaikoura bay; it was drizzling in the distance, and I was able to catch a bit of the rainbow with the last rays of the sun at my back... the amazing Kaikoura is awaiting us... but that's for a future blog entry:

Relaxing in Hanmer Springs (aka Lothlorien)

(Hi, I'm Josele and I'll write this post and the following posts. We have not had too much time to update the blog these last days, so I'll write two entries, one for our trip and stay in Hanmer Springs, and a second one for our bike trip to Kaikoura... The very good news is that the computers in the YHA of Kaikoura read my Canon SD memory, so I'll be able to post photos in these two entries and add some photos for past entries.)


After a great train trip from Arthur Pass, we arrived in Christchurch where we spent only enough time for us to miss the mountains and to walk a bit around the town. Christchurch has very nice gardens, but apart from that we did not see anything really worth the trouble (apart from a short visit to a Starbucks cafe to take some photos with which to try to annoy Daniel the Starbucks-freak). We felt very happy with our change of plans (taking the train so that we could spend only half a day in Christchurch and be able to reach Hanmer Springs with the bike).

So the following day we woke up very early (a bit before 6am) to get another train to Waipara, a small village north of Christchurch, very known by wine connaiseurs as the site of the Pegasus Bay winery... From the train we could see huge plains filled with vineyards, the biggest we have ever seen, all beautifully arranged in rows, with their drip watering system and rose bush in front of each row...

We arrived at Waipara at 8am, and started our 77km. uphill stage to Hanmer Springs (during the day we would climb a bit more than 300 meters)... The trip was tough, but we had some help from the wind and from the nice cafes we stopped along the road, our favourite one in a village called Culverden, the Red Post Cafe:

We also had great views along the trip. This country is amazing, and you never get tired of the wonderful views. The landscape has changed from the West Coast, as it is now drier and more similar to the mountain landscapes you can see in Spain and France, though with no houses...

 Hanmer Springs is a loooong looong village, and it took us the last of our energy reserves to get from the village entrance to our hostel, but we were happy we had one full day to relax after so much biking in the past two weeks... First of all, we had a big Flintstones steak in a local restaurant:

We spent most of our relaxing day in the Hanmer Springs Thermal Pools. We bought the "luxurious package" and received also a well deserved 60-minute massage, exactly what our exhausted body needed after 10 bike stages!... Of course I was more worried about not falling sleep and drowning in the pools than taking pictures, but this day Internet is a great place to find some cool photos of any place you visit. This is a good one I found in http://www.travel-location-blog.com/hanmer-springs-canterbury-nz-120-pictures.htm

And that is all for the moment. I'll make a second entry later during the day about our record breaking Hanmer Springs- Kaikoura bike stage... Now we are off to a winery in Kaikoura where we'll have a tasting and a lunch.

Greymouth-Westport, one of the most beautiful scenic drives in the world

(Hi, I'm Josele; as we split in Hokitika, I'll tell my part of the journey until Arthur's Pass, aka Moria)

After leaving Fox Glacier I started feeling lazy and decided not to climb to Arthur's Pass with the bike, so I did an easy 40km. flat short stage to Greymouth and rented a car there. Greymouth was not too interesting (at least what I saw while biking) and I found Hokitika prettier.

We had met a couple of Slovenians during the Milford Track and they had told me that the stretch of road between Westport and Greymouth (100km. long) was the most beautiful road they had seen in the country (they had a camper van), so I was curious to see it... Later, I checked in the Lonely Planet, and they have put it in their Top Ten Scenic Drives in the World, so if you like driving and come nearby, think about doing it, because it is well worth it.

The drive is without doubt the best I've ever done in my life. Ok, I don't have a lot of expertise driving in amazing roads, but it's comparable (to me, even more beautiful) to the scenic drives between Nice and Monaco, and the route 1 south of San Francisco in western US (which I had the luck to drive).

The road meanders through valleys (with many curves with 25 or 35 kph limit), the mountains covered with rainforest. At times, it gets closer to the sea, and then you find yourself awing at 50+m. tall cliffs over the sea. The whole coastline is dotted with the famous "pancake rocks" of New Zealand's West Coast... They are limestone rocks, formed approx. 150 million years ago from the fossilized remains of many long dead animals, fused with the rocks that emerge from the ocean (this area is where the Pacific and Asian tectonic plates meet). Some 100 thousand years ago, the rocks emerged from the bottom of the sea, and the water has been constantly eroding them, taking away the softest bits (the fossilized animals) and leaving only the hardest parts of the rocks, thus giving them the shape of stacked pancakes.

The coast has also many more things to see, although I only had time to visit a seal colony, 10 km. to the south of Westport. I had a lot of time, so I could thorougly enjoy the drive, never doing much more than 55-60 kph. I think I was also lucky with the light, as the sun was shining from the see and I could take really nice photos.

Talking about photos, I have loads of them to share, but the computer's SD connector does not seem to work... I hope I can fix it.

This morning I took the bus from Greymouth and arrived at Arthur's Pass a bit before 10am, so I was able to do a couple short 1-hour walks in the valley while waiting for JL Blasco. The view is amazing, a bit like the Swiss Alps, and we are being lucky with the weather (although it seems we'll get a storm tomorrow evening...hopefully it'll let us do some hiking during the day).


And now, I'm off to try to solve the SD connector problem and share the photos.

The Big Deluge

(Hi, it's Josele again; I'll be in charge of updating the blog today)

After yesterday's mega-exhausting Wanaka-Makarora trip (with constant head winds of 20-30 kmh), we were a bit afraid of today's bike stage: 80km. between Makarora and Haast on the west coast. The weather forecast was rain the whole day, and we knew we had to go over Haast Pass, climbing a bit more than 300 meters from our starting point.

Well, the weather forecast was quite accurate, and we were battered the whole 80km. by 3-6 mm. of unending rain. I've never been so soaked in my whole life!

On the other hand, the rain made the road emptier and thus safer than previous days (we avoided all the "extreme" adventurers of New Zealand) and the trip was beautiful, with hundreds of small to medium size waterfalls dotting the mountains that surround the river Haast (along which we biked most of the day). A pity it was raining so much that I could not use my camera to take some pictures, as the landscape was amazing (the light for taking photos not so much, though).

Also, we made it up the pass in record time... actually, we did it so fast that we only realised we had climbed the Haast Pass when we saw the signpost, so our moods went quite high when we realised what we had achieved! It appears that the previous biking days have increased our endurance with the bike.

After that, our bike guide described the road as "gently undulating" which in JL Blasco's means "neverending up-slopes"... you see, he is the king of the flat and the downhill, and whenever we had 1km+ of this kind of road I quickly lost him of sight, to find him a bit later puffing and swearing while climbing a slope (clearly, I'm the climber of the group; specially now that he has lost his left foot cleat)... My favourite two phrases of the day from him were:
1.- "damn... the uphill slopes are always longer than the downhill ones!", which absolutely makes sense in the temporal dimension though, in this particular case, not in the space dimension (this one goes specially for those who have seen Airbag and remember the scene with the "Guardia Civil").
2.- "when I arrive in Wellington, I'll go to the Minister of Highway Building and throw my bike at them"... this said of course while cursing and puffing up an uphill slope... :))

Anyway, we somehow managed to arrive in Haast in two hours less than we originally foresaw. Soaked to the bone as we were, we decided to go for a room a bit more cozy than in previous days... after the camping in Makarora it feels quite decadent.

The specialty food in Haast is whitebait, a fish caught in the area, which we plan to taste tomorrow (we'll buy whitebait sandwiches, which apparently are relatively famous in the region, or so says the Lonely Planet)... Another thing for which Haast is renowned in New Zealand is its gemstone industry, started already by the Maoris long time ago. Some of the gemstones found in the region are "endemic" of New Zealand and thus can only be mined in this area.

Tomorrow we'll start the last two stages of our approach to Fox Glacier. It should be an easy 55-60km. mostly flat trip to Lake Paringa (weather forecast says it'll be sunny with some clouds and almost no wind... I hope they are right), where we will camp and ready ourselves for the final stage to the West Coast Glaciers.

By the way, Internet and mobile services in Haast are almost non-existent, so I'll have to wait to Fox Glacier to publish more photos in the blog.

Why do we bike? Why all roads should have a 1m+ shoulder?

(Hi. I am JL Meseguer, a.k.a. Josele. We could not find a way to have the two of us adding new posts to the blog, so from time to time I'll add a post using JL's ID). I usually talk/write too much, but please bear with me just a moment, and hopefully I'll be able to explain in only a few paragraphs the meaning of this post's title.

Today we arrived in Queenstown for our second stage of the journey. As we had a bit more than half a day, we decided to do some wine tasting in the Gibbston valley. Sadly for us, all wine tours were closed and taking a taxi would be too expensive and/or contrary to the kind of trip we wanted to experience. Fortunately for us, we were supposed to pick up the bikes today... as you see, we had all "perfectly" planned since April   :))    and the guy at the bike shop told us there was a really nice winery where we could have a wine tasting and dine at Lake Hastings, only ~20km from Queenstown... So we decided to try the bikes and visit the winery, which proved to be a perfect choice.

If you have only 1 minute time, please read the following paragraph, as it is the only really important thing I want to say in my post:
Most people will ask themselves: why do we bike? (philosophical rambling here, but probably the only remotely worthwile readable part of my post) If for nothing else, I will be eternally grateful to The Netherlands for giving me the chance to discover the immense satisfaction of biking through the landscape... pedal stroke after pedal stroke, meter after meter, tree after tree, slope after slope, pool after pool, village after village, mountain after mountain... the whole beauty of this amazing world develops in front of your eyes at slow motion, at a relaxed pace, giving you the time and state of mind to savour it fully, to suck its marrow and become a part of it, a part of the world, connected to it all through your sweat and determination... between you and all these wonders there's only the air you breath and the energy of your last meal being spent with every heartbeat and every foot push... neither windshield, nor engine vibration, nor hurry, nor emotional detachment diverts you from this feeling of absolute connection with the landscape you bike through and with the world you live in.

There is no photo I could show you that would do justice to this feeling... The colours are brighter, the air fresher, the sky bluer, and the mind clearer whenever you let yourself onto the bike seat and hit the road... I guess it must be the same feeling those cowboys/cowgirls had when riding their horses onto the sunset, surrounded by the wilderness and intimately connected to their surroundings but, as I am a poor horseman (and I have tried horse riding several times believe me) I can only guess...

So, if you are lucky enough to live in a bike friendly country such as The Netherlands, Denmark or Germany, grab the bike and pander yourself with a long trip through their well maintained bike pathways... If you live in a less friendly bike country, don't despair and try your bike at any scenic road with a 1m+ shoulder. 1m+ shoulders work wonders and make the roads very safe for cyclists... Try it out, close your eyes (well, not too much, remember you are moving at ~17km/h), and savour the experience, you won't regret it.


The end of the story is that, after 1,5 hours biking and with a bit of effort, we arrived at the winery 5 minutes before they closed the tasting (again, as "perfectly" planned since April 2010): we had a wine tasting, then the "Trust your Cook" menu with the wine arrangement. JL Blasco will better able than me to describe the wines... I just can say that the winery was enjoying a sunbath between the beautiful Lake Hayes and a golden mountain sprinkled with grapevine freckles, and that, as we crossed its gate to bike back to Queenstown, our bellies full of juicy food, she wished us a good trip and lazily rolled 90 degrees to better tan its back.




PS: we met a cool Spanish guy from Barcelona in the Te Anau-Queenstown bus (well, he is probably the nth powered to the nth interesting person with a supermegacool journey that we meet in this trip). We'll go now to drink a couple beers with him in a bar, then go to bed early, as tomorrow will be a long adventuresome day... but more about that tomorrow...

PSS: we finally found a good Internet connection, so tomorrow I'll try to find some time to upload some of the photos I have taken with my Canon; please stay tuned... and thanks for reading all the above: if you reached this far without falling sleep, you are my hero... :))