We are leaving the Canadian winter behind for a long awaited trip to the deep South Pacific, a part of the world not seen by Tara, and not by George in 45 years(!). This will be a different adventure from cycling in Europe where bike paths and trails parallel to highways are relatively common. For one, everyone rides and drives on the left side of the road. Two, the cycling infrastructure has not progressed as it has in Europe, probably because the density of people is much less in New Zealand, and Three (?). But from our research, they are busy catching up. We will be staying for 3, 4, and 5 nights in places along the route and taking day trips out and back, rather than 2 or 3 nights most commonly on our previous rides. There are 23 ‘Great Rides’ identified across the country many of which are old rail trails and many others which are gravel pathways. We will be on several of these on our planned route, which you can see above. Also we take several ferries as this is an island nation after all. With our bike we can ride on gravel as well as tarmac (kiwi word) and where we are on smaller roadways (most of the time) there isn’t likely to be much traffic.
New Zealand is bigger than we initially thought, from a ‘cycling the whole thing’ perspective. We will only be on the northern half of the north island, and even then will be using a train, and a bus, and a longish ferry (straight lines on the map) to help cover the territory. We essentially do a loop east and south of Auckland where we begin, and then a north loop up to the Bay of Islands. We are fortunate to have planned in visits with NZ friends and Calgary friends as part of the north loop.
On Saturday the 17th of January we fly to Honolulu direct from Calgary, overnighting only, before flying onward to Auckland over the dateline into Monday. This breaks up what would otherwise be a 14 hour flight, and that’s only from Vancouver. Once we are finished our seven weeks of cycling and return to Auckland, we head to Fiji for a week of rest (phew!) on the way back to Honolulu, and home. We trust that our new bike cases will be waiting for us in Auckland when we get there. Now I have trackers on the bike as well as each piece of luggage so I will be watching… (see the last blog entry and images below)
geeteetravels 