Angry Pirate

Oh no. It's that time of year again when I talk about nothing but mountain biking. It's looking to be a great season, with mighty bike touring legs pedalling the light mountain bikes up the hills with ease. Last Friday was my first Whistler Bike Park day. How else can you ride 2400m in 5 short hours? Despite a touch of snow, conditions were fabulous and great grins were had by all.

Cumberland and Tofino

Upon returning from New Zealand, the first thing I had to do was go on a second vacation. So two weeks later, I was off to Cumberland to meet up with friends for mountain biking. It was a little optimistic to head to Cumberland this early in the season. Our first day found a touch of snow up high, but as we got better at navigating the area, it was easy to avoid.

Our first trail was named "Bucket of Blood." Surely this would be a trail suitable for a beginner right? Meghan disagreed.

"Crafty Butcher" had this wonderful series of teeter-totters. I wasn't sure I wanted to be up there. Sure enough, you can see my twisted hip and shoulder getting ready to jump sideways off the structure. Moments after this photo was taken, I was bounced from the landing teeter-totter off the side. Note to self, when riding up teeter-totters, it's easier to ride off the ramp at the end.

Though there was not much rain, we only had one day of proper sunshine on the trip. But oh how it was glorious when the sun shone.

Curiously there are no pictures of the fantastic beach house in Union Bay where we stayed. (Well, actually, I didn't take any photos at all. Luckily Meghan did take the great photos you're seeing now.) One highlight of the beach house was the abundance of oysters when the tide went out. It was very challenging to get the oyster safety report from the DFO website (the number of regions and the format of the report is quite bewildering), but in the end I concluded oysters from that area were safe to eat. Much slurping of raw and barbecued oysters ensued.

After suffering through a week of mountain biking, Meghan dragged me off to the coast for some surfing. Unlike my previous attempt 12 years ago, it was nice to actually go with someone who knows how to surf. I spent around 7 hours in the water over three days and stood on my board for a total of 10 seconds. It was fun! And the wetsuits with hoods, gloves, and boots keep you warm even in cold, rainy, miserable conditions. Thankfully. I may have to go back for a sunny surf trip to truly love the sport.

Pleasantness

Well hello once again, legions of loyal blog readers. I'm sorry I've had so little to say about my New Zealand trip. The problem in a nutshell is that New Zealand is extremely pleasant, and it's hard to make niceness interesting. How many times can you hear "the scenery was amazing", "the weather was beautiful", "the roads are in fantastic shape" before you yawn and move on to more intriguing reading.

The climate is particularly bland. Community said it best - New Zealand is the model for pleasant temperature.




So while it may be gauche to complain about a holiday, perhaps I will share some of New Zealand's challenges.

Fences

Between Hokitika and Wanaka there is 400km of biking dotted only periodically with a tiny town of no more than 400 people. So what's between the towns you ask? A naive Canadian like me expected to find wilderness. Instead you find endless agricultural land. In fact, I'd wager more than 90% of our biking was bordered by agricultural land. Now fortunately I like sheep and cows, and don't really mind a foreground of farm land, but the major irritant is the fences. You're trapped in a tunnel with barbed wire or electric fences on both sides. Looking for some shade? A nice place to sit and eat lunch? Some bushes to pee behind? A wild place to camp? Sorry all off limits.

Meghan was the first to discover that the thin looking wire fences were indeed electric. What does it feel like to get zapped by an electric fence? "It wasn't really painful at all. But I'll never touch it again."

Sandflies

Sandflies, no-see-ums, blackflies, or midges as they are known in various countries are insane on the West Coast. They got steadily more numerous as we made our way towards Haast. At first they were encouraging. While you were on your bike and pedalling the wind would keep the blood sucking vampires at bay. So, want to rest and siesta in the sun and have a snack? Denied! Keep moving. But as we got to Haast their volume was so thick that you'd run into them while cycling on the road, at which point they'd cling and bite you. Poorly situated campsites could inspire a haze of thousands while you attempted to cook, erect the tent, or pack up in the morning.

Campsites

With all land behind a fence and laws and notices prohibiting you from camping anywhere without a toilet (makes sense), you're forced to spend your nights at official campgrounds. The Department of Conservation (DOC) campsites were the most natural, often just a bit of flat land near a lake or river with nothing but a toilet, but the DOC seems unaware of the existence of sandflies. They seem to site their campgrounds as close to lakes, rivers, and swamps as possible and make sure the site is sheltered so not a breath of wind can push the flies away. Luckily sandflies go to sleep at night. So problem solved! End the day, sit for several hours inside your tent, and then go out and cook at night. Just don't turn on your headlamp if you don't want dozens of moths in your face and food.

Commercial campsites are outfitted with indoor kitchens, showers, and toilets. The hot showers have definitely been a perk of NZ touring! But space is quite limited and you'll almost certainly have several campervans within 10 feet of your tent. Campsites look a lot more like parking lots than camp grounds to my Canadian eyes.

Keas

"That'll be $13 each. You can put your tent up over here, showers are across from the office, kitchen's in the back, and I've left the garage door open for your bikes. Not that I think they'll pinched or nothing, but you know, the keas...."

"The um, keas?"

"Yeah, you know, might be better off just hiding the bikes. They tend to like tyres, cables, and seats."

"Um, ok, thanks."

We'd read about the pesky wild parrots in all the New Zealand guidebooks, but from what we read, keas live in the alpine, and the campsite at Fox Glacier was only at 300m. Did we really need to put our bicycles in the garage? It seemed unlikely in the late afternoon.

But as dusk approached, loud kea cries filled the air. They sound like a two-year old child 7 seconds after falling off the slide when catching the first sight of blood on the elbow, as bellowed through The Who's amplifiers. We could see them shuffling back and forth on their bare branch over the camp site waiting for night to fall. We sensibly tucked our bicycles into the garage.

But being on an island without bears or raccoons for weeks, we'd rather got into the habit of just storing our food in the vestibule in the tent. I awoke at night to the sounds of a loud beak tearing through plastic. My biggest worry was that those strong beaks might tear through tent or pannier in search of food. Stepping out of the tent, I soon discovered that keas are entirely fearless. A showdown of stomping, yelling, clapping, and threatening gestures was returned by a bemused look. There seemed to be nothing to do but to return to the tent, try to sleep, and just see what the keas had done in the morning. Luckily, aside from a box of crackers inadvisedly left on a picnic table by other campers, there was little damage in the morning.


All right, enough griping. Time to go out and spend a beautiful day in Oamaru where hopefully the famous blue penguins will make an appearance this evening

Birds

Most of what I know about New Zealand, I learned from Douglas Adams' amazing lecture on the Kakapo. Certainly worth 15 minutes of your time if you haven't heard it before. Pt 1 Pt 2. It had me very excited to see some new birds on the island.

New Zealand did not disappoint. At first, all I could see were the big birds, the smaller birds hiding in the thick leaved forests. My early favourites were the Pukekos which like to hang out in farmers' fields.



Also peculiar are the spur-winged plovers, which look like they ought to be on the seashore, but instead are always hanging out with cows and sheep.



One species that's noticably missing from the island is crows. Consequently, road-kill lingers about far longer than in other countries. The most common road-kill appears to be stoats, possums, and hedge-hogs. Bird wise, the champion is definitely the silvereye, a bird with a total lack of ability to master road crossings. Other common road denizens include the kahu, the weka, and the tomtit.

Luckily I've managed to see all the road birds alive since then as well as New Zealand's native owl - the morepork, australasian shoverles, keas, bellbirds, tuas, fantails, oystercatchers, scaups, little shags, spotted shags, grey warblers, kereru, the new zealand falcon, reef herons, paradise ducks, and more. There seem to be birds everywhere. It seems my decision to take binoculars as one of my luxury items was weight well spent.

The meadow and the wasp

After a few luxurious rest days in Picton, staying at the palatial vacation home rented by our friends Hendrik, Eric, and Janelle, we headed down to Blenheim and across the country to Westport. Blenheim was a particularly nasty town, with no plant life within city limits, lots of shouting, scowling, and angry citizens, and little to recommend it. But soon after, we had some nice touring up a minor road through farmland and then up to the mountains of Nelson Lakes National Park. On our third night on the road, we stayed in the town of Owen River, which as far as I could discern, consisted solely of a single pub on an otherwise empty stretch of highway.

Behind the pub was a lovely meadow next to a river rapids with a shelter, hot showers, and toilets. Everything you could want from a campsite. Despite a moment of despair as we watched the only other tenants of the site wash their motorhome with a hose from the rain barrel that provided the water for the site, we soon settled in to a very lovely evening.

The site did have one drawback. The flowery grasslands attracted many wasps and giant bumblebees. Now as we all learned as children, if you don't bother a wasp, the wasp won't bother you. Perchance you've since questioned the truth of this statement. How does the wasp decide if you're bothering it? Does the wasp detect your emotions and feelings, and provided you maintain a calm posture, continue on it's way without interaction?

To investigate, after my morning shower, I put on my bike shorts without shaking them out. When I felt the wasp in my shorts, I immediately with good will and good intentions, sought to lower my shorts to allow the wasp to continue on its day without further disturbance. I regret to report that despite my positive feelings and my desire to set the wasp free, it reacted in a vengeful and hostile fashion stinging me in my groin. I must thus conclude that intentions notwithstanding, the merest minor disturbance of being trapped between spandex shorts and a thigh can cause a wasp to react in a most vigorous fashion.

Tomorrow, I'll be heading down the West Coast #6 highway to Greymouth. More updates as internet access permits.

This is my second post in a day. The first post is Pedaller's Paradise.

Pedaller's Paradise

* There will be no pictures in these blog posts. You'll have to pretend that it's a travel report from 2002 when digital photographs were rare. If you'd like to see pictures from the trip, see Meghan's blog at http://www.meggomyeggo.com/, or naturally teh internets

Having now cycled across the country widthwise ( Nelson - Picton - Blenheim - Westport ) it's time for a rest day and some blogging.

The best guidebook for New Zealand cycle touring is named Pedaller's Paradise. Well that sure sounds great. But then as the tour approached everyone kept mentioning how crazy the drivers are and how the roads have no shoulders. Which is it? Paradise or terrible roads?

Well, the answer of course is both. A typical road in New Zealand looks like this:




Whoops, of course that photo is outdated. The road has since been fully modernized and now looks like this:



You'll note that despite clearly being a one-way road, there were no stop lights, stop signs, or other controls to navigate this section. Well clearly I've picked a particularly bad example for humour's sake. A more typical section of road would look like this:



I know in Canada the dotted white line would mean that both lanes are headed in the same direction, but in New Zealand this is a two-way road. Almost all the roads we've been on have been like this; two lanes, no shoulder.

So, you might ask, given that there's no shoulder and only one lane in each direction, how can this be a wonderful place to cycle tour? The answer comes from the extremely low traffic counts. Let's have a look at the official government of New Zealand road count statistics. Or rather, let me pick out some key data points. On the section of Highway 6 where the first two photos were taken, the government counts an average daily traffic rate of 1000 vehicles per day in both directions. So in the course of a day, on average 500 vehicles will pass you. If we assume the majority of traffic is in the daylight hours, that's 40 vehicles per hour. Even better, traffic clumps behind slow moving vehicles. So you ride for 10 minutes with no traffic, then get passed by a stream of 2-6 cars, and then ride onward on a car-free road. Much of the cycling has truly been tremendous.

The first day of cycling however, was not tremendous. In retrospect, our first day cycling from Nelson to Pelorus Bridge was on one of the scariest stretches of road on the South Island. In the area around Nelson, New Zealand's beautiful old growth forests, a mix of hardwoods, tree-ferns, softwoods, and podocarps, have been replaced by perfect rows of commercial pines. Transporting those harvested pines to Nelson over the Wangamoa pass are logging trucks in a frightful hurry. The road is very twisty with terrible sight lines and no shoulders. All traffic that is not a logging truck is terrified of rounding a corner and meeting a speeding logging truck, so vehicles pass extremely close to you. Traffic is also much heavier near the city of Nelson. All in all, it was a pretty spooky day. Though I put on a brave face and cheerfully declared that I liked cycle touring and New Zealand, in my heart I thought I may have signed up for a terrifying death race. Luckily, since that first day, traffic volumes have severely declined, drivers are willing to give much more space when passing, and sight lines have improved. The stretch between Blenheim and Kawatiri Junction had a traffic count of 360 vehicles per day in both directions. Cycling bliss.

This is just for practice right

In just three more days I'll be heading off to New Zealand for five weeks of bike touring. Meghan very sensibly recommend that we should go on a test ride before we go. And so it was that we packed absolutely everything we'd be taking onto our bikes and headed out for a little self-propelled adventure from our front door to Porposise Bay Provincial Park.



We spent most of the trip in a major storm. It was almost fortunate. For the first time in my life it happened; we had strong tailwinds out to Porpoise Bay and then in the night the wind turned around and we had tail winds back to Vancouver! The only downside was 40mm of rain, a bit of snow, and occasional terrifying gusts of 90km/h winds.



This was my first time using front panniers. Experienced bike tourers rave about them. They love the space, the balance, and the stability. But I wasn't loving them at all. With all the weight on my front wheel I was finding my bike especially twitchy. I had an unusually wobbly ride over the Lion's Gate bridge, and then after another wobbly ride over a bridge on the Upper Level's highway it occurred to me that perhaps something else was wrong. Indeed a quick mechanical inspection showed a loose quick release lever and my front wheel trying hard to leave my bike. With a newly secured wheel, the trip got much better.



In Sechelt, I was seduced by the smell of cooking onions and the promises of the hot dog lady. "All our meat comes from the butcher. None of that mystery meat." Well, I was feeling pretty tired of eating live animals and tofu, so I was glad that there was finally a hot dog available that comes from a butcher. Sure enough, it was mighty tasty.



The campsite included this thought-provoking scene:



A pileated woodpecker lived at our site. It's just like the cartoons. Morning comes and it sounds like a construction site. Woodpecker not in photo:




Before the trip I went to Mighty Riders to see about getting my bike fitted. Before I even got on my bike Ed immediately declared that my bike was way too small for me. That may be, I argued, but the bike is only three years old, I'm not getting a new one. Ed, the mighty salesman, countered that I could just buy a new frame that fits, and keep all my old parts. And so I have a new bike! Well, new frame, plus old wheels, disc brakes, brake levers, cassette, hubs, bottom bracket, shifters, crank arms, pedals, racks, handlbars, and chain ring. The fit is fantastic and I hope it leads to a pain-free tour.



The return trip home saw no rain, which was terrifically exciting, and as previously mentioned, despite all expectations, we had a tail-wind for the return trip. And it was very very windy. How windy was it? At least a dozen people were surfing the wind swell in North Van! The return trip across the Lion's Gate Bridge necessitated pushing the bikes. It's hard to estimate wind, but I'd say there was a steady 60km/h breeze with gusts up to 90km/h. You could actually feel the bridge deck lifting and swaying in the wind at the apex!



It was a super-fun tour weekend and it feels like we have everything together for New Zealand. Roary came along and was so well behaved that he's earned a spot on the international trip. I can't believe we leave on Friday. Very exciting.