Day4: Methven

When you decide to blog about your trip with mates you really have to pick your friends carefully. I didn’t. Actually in general one should pick friends carefully and to be honest I was a bit casual with this bunch. Anyway, we set off in surprisingly cold conditions because metservice lied. It was however a stunning morning although pretty cold. The rainbow road is a lovely route from St Arnaud to Hanmer Springs. Over 100km you get to start off in beech forest with a few creek crossings for interest. It then changes to river flats in a wide valley and as you follow the Wairou River east it narrows into a gorge named hells gate. It’s very beautiful so you have to assume the person who named it was a miserable git but maybe doing it 100 years ago on a mule was a different experience. From the gorge you climb up to a saddle at roughly 1200m before descending into the Molesworth station and joining the mighty Clarence (before it is mighty) as it flows past Hanmer. The country changes into wide high country pasture bounded by mountains to the north and south. Our trip today was made more interesting by meeting a large convoy of vintage cars full of impressively cheerful people who did not realise they had just emasculated the Ford Ranger crowd. The temperature had started cold and got even colder so that we eventually had to stop and put on whatever cold weather gear we could muster. With some stamping of feet we headed off, snot streaming into a fine drizzle but no dust at least. Down Jolly’s pass into Hanmer where we enjoyed a warming second breakfast and obviously a coffee. 

Well I had put up with a bit of muttering about the blog from my friends, as if thier shortcomings are my fault. Dave Lear is quite affronted and appears to be convinced that my reporting of the facts is not true. Fuck him. Bernie isn’t much good. He quietly gets on with things, eats his vegetables and is generally polite. Not much to talk about. He does have some failings which include cheerfully greeting and talking to all sorts of people as if it’s normal 

Anyway, thank god we have Dave Mac who provides a veritable smorgasbord of blog fodder on a daily basis and the only challenge is to select which of his misdemeanours to include. 

As an example, if you hypothetically were enjoying breakfast in a public restaurant and you saw a scrunched up soggy tissue on a table would you a: gag and walk away, b: delicately smother it in another tissue and dispose of it or c: use it to clean the visor of your helmet?

Obviously DM picked c. Please see earlier paragraph on cold, snot. Join dots. 

I could go on but in the interests of global peace I won’t. 

Tomorrow we are heading up the Rakaia Gorge into some spectacular scenery. If Google wasn’t run by a bunch of complete pricks I could even show you some photos. 

Day 3: St Arnaud

It’s a tough gig being a reporter. Our code dictates that we report the facts and allow the reader to make up their mind with no attempt to influence the readers perceptions. Ask any reporter for Stuff and they will confirm this. But despite this objectivity we face a continuous stream of vitriol from people who perceive themselves to be victims of biased reporting. It hurts. 

So today we had a lovely ride which I’ll come back to. When we arrived at our accommodation there is a perfectly good parking spot outside. Dave Lear, who has spent too much time with the other Dave, thought to himself (I assume that some thought passed between his ears), that he would park on the lovely little, carefully tended, lawn that lies adjacent to the aforementioned parking spot. So up over the kerb he goes and positions his bike in a place most likely to cause offence ( a lesson he has almost certainly learnt from Dave Mac). 

I tried to gently coax him back to civilisation when karma stepped in and placed a rock on the ground behind Dave’s heel. The rock was joined shortly after by his bum and momentarily later by his bike on top of everything. Fortunately he chose to do this in full view of the entire motel community so that everyone could see what justice looks like. 

Now, all I have done is report the facts. 

All of this was preceded by a lovely day’s riding, initially riding up the Leatham River valley. This is a fantastic little track running through beech forest and periodically crossing side creeks and the Leatham River itself. The afternoon brought enough rain to let me know that my rather old waterproof gortex kit is no longer waterproof. Cleverly it lets the water in but not out. So with water pooling inside the jacket elbows and pockets we stopped for a bite to eat in our first pass through St Arnaud. I was able to place all that water inside an entirely undeserving cafe. The shame. 

The sun came out and so did we, not in a sexual orientation way ( it’s still too early on trip for that)) but in an afternoon loop, riding the really fun but quite physically challenging Porika track eventually descending to Lake Rotoiti where we devoured the instagram views whilst in turn being devoured by sand flies which don’t appear on instagram. We moved along onto the Braeburn track, another beech forest delight before heading back to St Arnaud.  

Lovely. 

Tomorrow we head over the Rainbow Road from west to east before a long transport to Methven. 

I will be unable to attach photos but despite that I’ll pretend I can. 

Day 2: Blenheim

So the other 2 gentleman joined us a little later last night. Bernie skidded into Turangi spraying vital fluids from his bike as he scattered various important little bolts and hose clamps behind him. Thankfully Dave Mac was still at home doing whatever it is that he does before going anywhere. Usefully he was able to bring all the bits to fix Bernie’s bike with a convenient arrival time of 5 minutes after my bedtime. DM and Bernie fixed things during the night and this morning we were up early to start the Wellington leg to catch a ferry. It was colder outside the motel than inside which allowed me to ride over the desert road fondly thinking of my cold weather jacket and gloves stored in my backpack while fingers and then entire body froze. It’s a cold desert. Beautiful morning though with the sun rising over the Kaimanawa ranges and low clouds artfully highlighting valleys that would otherwise be hidden. 

We were very ready for a hot coffee and breakfast at our favourite little Brown Sugar cafe in Taihape so there was some consternation to find it closed due to a power outage. We found another spot down the road where we were able to have cabinet food that appeared to be only 24-48 hours old. It is adventure riding after all!

After this we had a pleasant and uneventful ride down to the ferry where our only issue was having to ignore Dave Mac’s attempts to make us late by trying to get us to ride on various random roads to keep things more interesting. We got to the ferry with 20 minutes to spare so a quick bite to eat and on our way. 

I write this somewhere in the Cook straight. The South Island beckons. Tonight we stay in Blenheim and tomorrow we will be doing our first off roading. Can’t wait. 

No photos today as it’s not practical to stop on the open road. Beautiful views if one looks, with both the central plateau and the Rangitīkei regions putting on a great show. Oh, and I can’t upload them anyway. 

Prologue

I love Dave Lear but he is a prick. Sometime over the festive season he texted me to advise that he had dislocated a tendon on the middle finger of his right hand doing some kind of manual labour that he clearly shouldn’t have been doing. With the obvious implication that he could no longer do effective sign language, he would also not be able to ride a motorbike for a while. Especially not with the demands of off road riding. This had significant implications for our up coming South Island ride. Of course my readership is aware that our little group heads off on an off road trip around the south every year. This year we had planned to reverse the route so as to traverse the sections we had done before in the opposite direction to previous years. This would keep things fresh and we had a few new tracks in mind to keep things even fresher. Plenty to get excited about then. Unless you aren’t going. 

Both of us nursed the disappointment over the summer, a little easier for me as I was in full on “training” mode for a mountain biking trip to Queenstown. However, with the pedalling behind me I was able to fully focus my sadness that my friend was not joining us this year. 

That was until a week ago,when I got a cheery text, as if nothing was amiss, advising he would not only be riding with us but in his rightful place at the front. He had seen his doctor who armed him with a shopping trolley worth of drugs with a side of bravado. Apparently it’s an experiment to see whether analgesia and denial can overcome mechanical failure. I’m sure it will go well. Welcome to the Wrong way round. 

Day 1: Turangi

Our first couple of days on these trips is a little like slipping into a comfortable old pair of shoes. You know what you getting but in a good way. Almost certainly there is a better metaphor out there to describe this. 

I left home late morning with a view to meeting Dave Lear at Whakamaru for lunch. Bernie and Dave Mac will arrive later. It would disrupt the entire fabric of time and space if they arrived sooner. 

Lovely day to be out with everything still looking very green for so late in summer. With a pleasantly balmy day there are lots of people out and about. Large packs of motorcycles taking advantage of the good weather. As usual the insects are also out and by the time I arrived at Whakamaru I could barely see through the entrails, legs, wings and other bits. No bird needs to go hungry here. 

We had a pleasant lunch of the mandatory toasted cheese and tomato and cruised down the western bays of Lake Taupo. Not much to report which is as it should be. Sadly there is a glitch in the Blogger platform which means photos are not uploading. I suspect it has something to do with Google trying to force me to use thier universe or it may be random. I hope but doubt that it will fix itself. Dave Lear tells me it’s not my fault which is all I needed to hear. For today I managed the issue by not taking any photos although it was certainly pretty enough. 

For now we are easing ourselves into the trip and shortly I shall ease myself into my first beer. Tomorrow the transport down the island continues with a ferry to catch.