CHAPTER 3
Biking New Zealand Day 1: Christchurch to Akaroa
Kacey is about 500 yards ahead of me. She seems small and unmoving against the bleak, flat, featureless horizon. The wind is a constant, in-your-face wall, with occasional malignant gusts thrown in every few seconds, usually timed perfectly with an overtaking car, which makes negotiating the 2” non-shoulder of the road rather tricky without resorting to a balance saving swerve across the ubiquitous “white line”, our physiomental division between happy cycling and certain death.
Our destination is the village of Akaroa, nestled along one of the many small bays that make up the Akaroa Harbor, a narrow tongue of water slicing upwards into the heart of the Banks Peninsula. At 80 kilometers from Christchurch, it is an ambitious goal for our first day of cycling- our first day of cycling any distance in over four months. We’ve been pedaling now for hours, though it seems like dozens of hours. The harder I push, the stronger the wind seems to get. The road turns, and the wind turns with it. A book on cycling New Zealand I recently finished aptly describes these infamous Kiwi winds as againsterlies. Another book I am in the middle of presents the Spanish phrase contra pelo, literally someone who brushes their hair contrary to the natural direction, or colloquially, someone who goes against the natural flow of things… in my case the wind, or maybe its life?
Biking for hours gives you lots of time to think. Sometimes we supplement our mile upon miles of solitude with some music, or a podcast, or a book on tape- discreetly streaming from our iPod through a single ear-bud into our left auricle- we always keep our road-side ear tuned to the sound of approaching traffic. But even with these distractions, we still have a lot of time to think…
What am I thinking on this first day of cycling: when we started the day, full of energy and excitement, I was thinking of how awesome this trip is going to be, and how lucky we were to have the chance to do it. Twenty five miles into it, against 20 knot winds, I was thinking how wind is really only good for sailors, kite-flyers and wind-turbines, and that the rest of us would be rather well off without it. And then we got to the “hill”. The 1562 foot high rim of the ancient volcano who’s exploded remains make the mass of the Bank’s Peninsula. Four miles of 7% (plus) constant uphill grade quickly relegated us to walking, or should I say pushing, our overburdened bikes. In hindsight, we should have called it a day at Little River, a small road stop and camping area at the bottom of the hill, but our uninitiated minds and muscles were too eager for our own good. By the time we realized our folly, we were already so far up the mountain that to turn back seemed like a foolish thing to do. We reluctantly keep trudging up the slope. After two hours we were rewarded with a spectacular panoramic view, if not an ominously cloudy one, of the Akoroa Harbor, and the promise of a 1500 foot pedal-free descent.
We bombed it. We took it for all that it was worth. With whoops and yells and no brakes at every hair-pin turn, we got payback for every grudging step we had made up the inverse side of that horrible mountain. At the bottom of the downhill, with six miles till Akaroa to go, I yelled to Kacey over the rushing wind that “we should try to keep our momentum up because it should be a flat shot from here on out”. Well, if I had designed the road, it would have been flat. But I didn’t, and it wasn’t. In fact, instead of running as a pleasant winding coastal road, it transformed into a series of bays divided by three more steep hills to be overcome, not nearly as high as the main ridge, but each one exponentially more crushing to our morale than the last. By this time it was dark, cold, sprinkling with the faint precursors of a heavy rain, and we had been biking for 10 hours, five more than we had anticipated. Now I was thinking “Why in the world are we out here?” “Why didn’t we buy or rent, and travel by car?” “Whose crazy idea was this?” And maybe most disturbingly “I think I would rather be back at the Pole washing dishes…” The final insult on the day was when we exhaustedly rolled into Akaroa, just to realize that the campground was another half a mile up the steepest hill we had seen yet. You won’t see this on the elevation profile below because my bike computer sardonically ran out of batteries a few miles before we reached town- there is nothing wrong with my Garmin mind you, they just don’t expect people to be out biking for more than 10 hours at a go.
To say that our first day on the bikes was “a bit tough” might be an understatement. Admittedly, there were a lot of things that we could have done differently to make it a more enjoyable and successful experience, but even so, the combination of strong winds and steep hills was one we were not mentally prepared for, nor could we do anything about. The most disheartening aspect of this first ride was that as far as we knew, all of New Zealand promised to be just as challenging. We consoled ourselves with the idea of a few days rest and relaxation in the beautiful little Akaroa, and the thought that we would catch a bus back to Christchurch, rather than kill ourselves trying to bike back over the rim of the volcano.
Akaroa turned out to be a delightful little fishing-turned tourist town. Initially settled by the French, they are holding on strong to the tri-color flag, a penchant for Gallic street names, and a profusion of expensive wine- but then again, everything is expensive in New Zealand, so maybe that wasn’t so unexpected. Most of our time there the town felt charmingly quite and calm, with a few dozen shops and restaurants to poke into lining the main street, and a seashell littered beach to distract you when you grew tired of walking around. Occasionally though, large cruise ships would make their way up the Akaroa Harbor and begin ferrying in literally boat loads of pushy tourists eager to walk, eat, and buy all that little Akaroa could offer in their 4 or 5 hours of shore leave. When these waves of pestilence would descend upon the village, we would normally find a shady bench and partake in the traveler’s favorite pastime of people watching, but mostly we were just trying to stay out of the way. I guess this same scenario is played out in a thousand other cruise ship destination towns every day the world over, and they probably all really appreciate the influx of money brought on by this “cattle car” tourism, but for me at least, the whole repeating process made me weary just watching it. I suppose we are tourists too, I just hope we are not of the same variety- bulls in this delicate little town of a china shop.
Our 5 days in Akaroa went fast, and before we knew it we were headed back to Christchurch on a bus, this time to start our cycling adventure in earnest.
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