The best ride ever

We are almost, almost there!
Today we had the last real bike ride in our trip and it felt like living a small brief version of the whole 1000 km. ride.
The beginning was very tough, we had a very, very strong headwind for the first 30 kms. It was a beautiful valley, but we are tired and it sapped the energy out of us. So as every day in this trip, New Zealand made us pay before giving up what there was to see. And as always in this trip, once you have payed the price you are not let down!
I will make a BIG statement and i do not really care if you think I exaggerate, but i honestly think it's not the case:
The roughly 15 kms between the small town of Havelock and the even smaller town of Anakiwa is the best strip of bicycle road on Earth.

We seriously thought about this and I am sorry, but places like Lake Como, Switzerland or coastal roads like Calufornia or Norway can go stuff themselves. The best is here. It is simply perfect, you climb from a picturesque fishing town on the side of a fjord covered in vegetation to a beautiful lookout point where you get to see two fjords at the same time. The climb is easyish, less than 100 mts altitude and no nasty ramps. The road then snakes down the second fjord twisting so that no car can go fast (actually there are not too many) and the bikes can take the whole road. That downhill is also magical because for more than 4 kms you do not need to pedal... or touch the brakes. It is just a gentle descent with the bike entering all those curves at the right speed, never slowing down or accelerating too much. And to finish, a flat road on the edge of the water until you cross a short flat patch of land between forests so that you can get into yet another beautiful fjord and reach Anakiwa. Absolutely picture perfect ride, like the advertisement of an expensive car.

Now we are resting a little, as I am not joking when I say we are exhausted. My legs hurt all the way coming here and I really suffered in the headwind so we could do a decent average. Josele is also a little spent, so starting tomorrow night, we'll both be quite happy to change the tone of the adventure. Tomorrow we'll do the last kilometres in this amazing ride and will move on to something completely different!

1000 kilometres!

Well! Yesterday, as we were crossing Blenheim, we clocked 1000 km, not bad!
We are very near the next change in our our adventure, but as always I will just tell you about past events...

(edit from Josele) I wanted to take a picture exactly when the counter showed 1000 km. but it reset itself to 0 as I have been using the trip counter and not the total counter! So I only have the photo taken 10 meters before.


It was a pity to leave Kaikoura, it really is a beautiful place and we had great times there, but time ran out and we had to move on. We took road number 1 to the north and after a pretty nice stretch of seaside road, we finished our day in a lonely farm in the middle of the Ure valley. Total population: 2 and a dog... as usual.

We were able to buy products from the farm and cook for dinner a very, very excellent barbecue together with the wine made out of the farmer's grapes. All of it in a sunny afternoon overlooking the rows of vines. Yes, we were clearly entering grape country!

The next day we did our easiest distance so far, just 56 km and we came through Blenheim to sleep in the middle of the very, very famous Malborough Valley. It is the biggest wine producing region in NZ and we intended to visit some wineries.

So between today and yesterday we have been able to have some much more fancy food and taste some good wine. We also have tasted a lot of normal wine, I have decided that with exceptions, NZ wine is not my favourite. We visited famous places, Clouby Bay, Seresin, Isabel and Wairau River and had lots of fun.
And still, even after all this poshers, we are having barbecue for dinner again!

(edit from Josele) I added to our latest entry one picture and two videos of our swim with the seals. Please check again that post to watch the videos as they are worth it. Also, the computer at the hostel does not read my Canon SD card, so I posted some photos I take with my IPhone while on the bike (the 999.99 km one I took standing).

Ulmo's garden

The sea.
 

Kaikoura is about the sea, all the kinds of sea you can think about. This village is a thin, thin and long strip of road along a great bay with beautiful mountains closing the horizon. In the middle of your eyes, no matter where you are in the village, is the sea.

When we got here, after many hazards already told in previous posts, we were shattered, dusty and tired of mountains and a big change of rhythm and scenery was needed, and boy, did we get it!

First, we booked in a luxurious hotel to rest our hurting legs, got a spa and fed our tired stomachs. Of course, this is Kaikoura, so we had fish, and it was delicious.

The next day, we took the bikes to the repair shop (850 kms on the onboard computer and they are starting to screech and groan all over the place) and got back to the hostel to prepare the afternoon. There we met a British couple who had gone on a fishing tour that morning and had been lucky enough to get two big crayfishes. Being British, they never ate fish, did not look too keen to eating a huge crayfish and they were looking to sell at least one to anyone who wanted it. Josele and me took the opportunity, they were asking for 6 times less price than in a restaurant and we fancied a little cooking.

The photos will show what a crayfish actually is and what we did with it.
This first photo shows the live crayfish:

This second photo is after we laid our hungry paws on it and had some special moments with a big pot, some fire and the crayfish:

And yes, for all you British readers, we did all the disgusting things you are supposed to do when eating seafood, biting, sucking and making horrible noises. We just left an empty shell, none of the insides was spared. It was delicious!

I would say it was an absolute success, awesome lunch and lots of enjoyment.

After that, we took a long walk on the cliffs. We had absolutely stunning views of the ocean, the birds and the seals. And after that, we had fish for dinner.

So, it seems like we had a lot of fish and sea, no?

Well, we just were getting warmed up, because I remind you that officially that day we were not supposed to be here, but on the road, so it was and off day, so to speak.

Today it was really Ulmo's day. For those who have not read the classics, first of all, shame on you and second of all, use Wikipedia, that's what it's there for!

First thing, today we went whale watching.

Kaikoura is famous for it's whale watching tours, you can basically get on a boat and tour around an area where there are big chances of seeing sperm whales. As an average, each tour gets one or two whale sightings, so it is pretty cool.

We had four sightings, got videos, saw the whales, saw hundreds of dolphins jumping all around us, saw the big Wandering Albatross (around 3 meters wingspan!)... We had an excellent tour, an awesome experience and we both said it would be an unforgettable and insuperable memory we'd cherish for a long time...

And in then, we went for the afternoon activity, swimming with the seals.

Only five places in the world allow swimming with the seals in the wild, and of those, the safest and less shark infested place in the world is Kaikoura. We basically had a snorkel, flippers and a wetsuit and were taken by boat to a rock cliff where the seals slept, took baths and basically played all over the place.

Now, that was f***ing an unforgettable and insuperable memory we'd cherish for a long time.

I have lots of trouble describing the feeling of floating less than 50 cms away from a seal biger than you that is basically lazily swimming by your side and that then decides to play with you by diving, changing direction, swimming very fast straight at you and in the last second, changing direction again and basically playing with you until it gets bored and then another comes in, and another, and another...

It has been incredible, absolutely bonkers, this animals are territorial, have big teeth and are actually very big. And yet in the water it's like playing with kitties.

Kitties with teeth.

Ulmo's kitties.

I will never forget today, I am pretty sure of that.

(edit2 from Josele) Here come the videos!

(edit from Josele) Well, for obvious reasons I don't have photos of the seals while we were snorkeling, as my camera is not waterproof and I did not bring a waterproof case with me to the trip... What I can say about the seal swimming activity is that it has been my best dive to date (I do 3-4 dives per year  in the Mediterranean); being able to see a wild animal as big or bigger than you so close to you is pure magic, and their eyes! They were constantly getting closer to inspect us and then swam around us... at the beginning  it was a bit scary but soon it was clear they were just playing... The guides told us that Fur Seals are very territorial on land but not in the water, so a great activity if you ever have the chance to do it, because you don't need to have a diving license to do it... The guide did take some videos, and he told us he would try to burn a CD with some of them so that we can pick it up tomorrow... if we get it, we'll post a video in this blog entry.

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.

A day without Blog post

Hello all, I was going to post a very nice piece of post, but I have received very bad personal news from Spain I do not think I am in the mood for light (and bad) comedy.
Tomorrow I will try to post, today you'll have to endure the suspense.

A change of pace

Today we had decided to change the pace of the trip. The remaining 100 kms to Christchurch were going to be very downhill and boring, so we decided to take the train instead of spending two day getting to Christchurch. You'll see in two day what are we going to do with those extra hours...

The train was very, very nice, it is considered one of the most beautiful rides in the world and to be honest it is quite spectacular. We rode over steel bridges and into tunnels, all the while leaving behind the beautiful Alps. I already miss them, Christchurch is really not worth the time we are spending there.

Anyway, I am very short on time, just two more lines to tell you to look back all the old posts! Josele has finally found a way to add photos and you'll see how much better things read with a photo by them! Enjoy!