Challenges Physical, Fiscal and Logistical

Well, it's been an interesting 10 days since we headed out of the town of Haast for the mountains, with three challenges to deal with. And just a reminder to our readers dealing with the challenge of seeing detail in the pictures given the format Blogger gives us: you can enlarge any photo by clicking on it, then return to the blog with the back button of your browser.

Haast Pass was a beautiful ride, but a bit harder than we expected. Amazing how much bigger and steeper the pass got since Louise rode over it with her daughter Lisa 15 years ago, even starting 30 km closer to the pass this time! Our ride began in the town that is the last place to get food or water for the next 80 km, Haast. We filled up every available water bottle, carried a bottle of juice, and brought along a can of pears for extra liquid as well as energy, and hydration was not an issue. Temperatures of 20-22 C (68-72 F) helped, and we even had a very light tailwind, not enough to push us along but at least not a hindrance. The first 50 km followed the wide Haast Valley,
mostly flat with occasional short rises we could do without getting into the granny gear, passing stunning waterfalls every few miles,
many descending 50 to 100 m in freefall from the glacially carved side of our valley. At lunch we had done 50 of our 80 km, but only 100 of the 563 m of climbing that had to be done.

The first physical challenge, however, was not the climb after lunch, but simply getting through lunch undevoured by the sandflies. The technique was to eat standing and holding the food with one hand, keeping the other hand and both legs free for sandfly control. Somehow we managed to free up a hand to take a shot of the gorgeous setting. It was certainly one of the most athletic lunches we've ever had!

Soon after the lunch break we were at the Gates of Haast, where the climb really started to bite. The road barely hung onto the side of the hill as it rose up at a more than 10% grade, and kept it up for 2-3 km.

It was time for our special weapon, "28th gear"
(an old joke explained many, many blog entries ago -- suffice it to say, the bike itself has 27 gear choices). Finally the climb relented into a manageable 1 or 2% grade, though still twisty as all get-out,

and at last we reached the summit, which had gained a meter from the 563 advertised elsewhere. On the way down we looked back for one view,

and stopped a second time for a very rewarding 20-minute hike to the Blue Pools, which were as advertised.

All in all, we felt fairly good about the day, tired as we were. The next day was 65 km to the town of Wanaka, past the upper reaches of Lake Wanaka and then over "the Neck" to nearby Lake Hawea. That's Lake Wanaka in the first shot, and again behind Louise, who's at the top of the Neck in the second.

Lake H wasn't quite as large but was just as impressive as Lake W, and quite moody in the fourth picture.

Although we had a tail wind most of the ride, up to 25 mph/40kph for a few glorious kilometers at the start of the day, it was a very tough day due to the climbing. We had booked 2 nights in Wanaka because Louise remembered it as a lovely town, and it is, but we mostly used the extra day to regain the will to live. Well, maybe that exaggerates a tad, but we were dog-tired! Nonetheless, we did do a short walk to the lake to capture the stunning view to the north from its little beach.


Since crossing Haast Pass we have been east of the Southern Alps, i.e. leeward of the moist Tasman Sea winds that drench the west side of the mountains. We kept remarking to each other how much it reminded us of the mountains around Wenatchee or Lake Chelan in our native Washington State, or of places we've seen east of the Rockies, such as in Montana.


When we got to Cromwell, which at 400 mm of rain a year is drier even than Wenatchee, we rested in Old Cromwell, a street made up of buildings rescued from the rising waters when the Clutha Valley was dammed for hydro about a decade ago. Ironically, rain caught up with us here the next morning, in one of the driest places in New Zealand, after we had successfully dodged it through the wet Westland! Well, rain wimps that we are, we hung out in the town library and then in a cafe until 2 pm, when the rain had passed on, and kept our rainjackets unused once again.


We were now 70 km from Queenstown but decided to break it up into 50 km and 20 km segments to spend a night in quaint Arrowtown, yet another gold rush town but almost certainly the most well-preserved. There is a small downtown with the old post office, assay office
and town shops now selling woolens and jade jewelry (NZ's most precious stone, also called pounamou from the Maori) plus the sorts of things that upscale boutiques sell everywhere you find them.
Arrowtown also has rescued what is now called The Chinese Settlement, a part of town where Chinese goldminers once lived segregated from the rest of town, but with the advantage of having a Chinese store and a community of kinsmen to help deal with being strangers in a strange land. In 1983 the government sponsored an archeological dig and restoration of some of the remaining buildings, and informative signs along a short walk helped explain why they came, how they lived, and how they came to drift away. The building Louise is peeking in and the one two over were homes, the one in between was a storage shed of some sort.
There were many other interesting walks we would have liked to do in Arrowtown but for the limits of time, and this is one place we will return to if or when we get back to New Zealand.


Finally we were on the road our bike book told us was "relatively flat" from Arrowtown to Queenstown. The book also didn't predict the headwind, so it was a pretty tough 24 km ride, but that's only 15 miles, and at last we were at our destination! As we mentioned in our last blog entry, this is the "adventure capital" of NZ, and in fact on the way between Cromwell and Arrowtown one day earlier we passed the place where it all started. The Kawarau Gorge is -- well -- gorgeous,
and in the early 1980's an enterprising young nut came up with the idea of jumping off an abandoned bridge in the gorge with elastic bungy cords attached to his feet. Not quite sure how he turned this into a business empire, let alone survived the world's first bungy jump, but it was already a Big Deal in 1994 when Louise's daughter Lisa took the plunge. That was on a hot late-summer day. On this revisit it was 17C/63F, and was clouded over. But in the course of a 25-minute stop we watched 3 women and 2 men jump off the darned thing.

Five of those minutes were occupied in watching an employee "talk down" a customer, pardon the pun, and for a while we weren't sure she was going to jump, but sure enough she joined the rest of 'em in leaping off.

Don't know if it was peer pressure or thinking "Golly, I just plunked down over US$80 for this thing, I might as well do it!"
BTW, after you stop bouncing, they add extra cord to lower you into a nearby boat to get reeled in, where for a few moments you are truly "Down Under!"

We referenced three challenges in the title of this entry, and the first challenge was one we felt we had met enough of as we rode into Queenstown. The climbing and the miles were starting to get to us, and the route ahead should we choose to continue southward was going to get far more remote, and be far from flat. We decided Queenstown was an honorable final biking destination, and the 1100 km we rode to get here were something we could feel good about. We headed into town to get some cash to help celebrate, and ran smack into challenge number two.

To understand what happened next, you have to remember that living on the road for almost two years poses some challenges. One of them is what to do about mail. Most of the folks who used to mail us important things like credit card statements now email them to us. But you have to have mail go somewhere, so we chose the home of one of our children, and the mail collects there quite nicely. We went through it twice last year when visiting, and there was virtually nothing that we didn't already know about, and the rest was stuff we didn't need to know about.

However, an unassuming letter reached this destination sometime since last September, containing a debit card from our bank to replace the atm card we carried with us, since our bank had decided to phase out the atm card. Well ... they put an instruction into the worldwide atm system that the card should be collected by any atm it got inserted into after such-and-such a date. Seems that date went by recently, and one of the atms in Queenstown did as instructed, and swallowed our card!

Yowp!!! NOW what do we do??? In fact, for the next unsettled 12 hours, until it was daytime in Seattle, we didn't even know why the card was taken. All we knew was the atm message: "contact your bank." The bank reassured us next morning that all was well with our account, figured out why the card had disappeared, and gave us a number to call for Visa Card Services. Long story short, we will have a new temporary debit card delivered to a hotel we're staying at a week from now.
In the meantime, before we commit to anything that costs money, we ask first if they accept credit cards, so we can save the few dollars of cash we have left in the wallet for emergency use. And, with our credit card, we did enjoy a nice Korean feast for Valentine's Day!

Which leads us to the final challenge, putting together an itinerary for the remaining 30 days we will be in NZ. We had previously planned the last week, just prior to when we reboard the Volendam, so that meant working out the remainder and making the necessary bookings. It's just astounding how much time and effort it takes to do this, but after reworking the plans umpteen different ways, then changing them a few more times, we've settled on renting a car and driving somewhat further south to Te Anau and Fiordlands National Park, then north to Abel Tasman National Park at the other end of South Island, with a number of interesting stops en route. We'll explain the route and maybe even have a map in the next blog, not to mention what we hope will be some terrific pictures from the deep, remote fiords of New Zealand's southwest coast. We'll close with a shot of our British tandem friends Lin and Bernard,
who have circled the South Island in the opposite direction from us and met us again here in Queenstown, and of the mountain range just southeast of town with the wonderful name of "The Remarkables."

Great Scenery and Close Calls with Disaster

We've been making our way down the west coast of the South Island, enjoying beautiful lush forests and rich meadows without having to "pay" for all this greenery with rainy days. Oh, we did sit out two days, and had one very wet night after we and our bike were under cover, but the wind has been almost entirely at our back, the traffic light, and life has been good -- mostly. But we'll get to that other side of things later in this entry.

The West Coast, aka the Wet Coast, is a rainforest, washed by winds whipping across the Tasman and dropping their moisture as they hit the Southern Alps, which they do as soon as they hit land. Annual rainfall is over 3 meters where we are, up to 5 in the mountains, quite a bit more than Seattle's average of 0.95 m. Except where rivers have created deltas, there's little flat land, yet the road has managed to get through without excessive hilliness, for the most part.

As some of the photos show, even the climbs have their payoffs in scenery. The climbs have mostly been 50-100 m (160-325'), but a few have climbed as much as 200 m. Unfortunately, a lot of them do it a bit too quickly for our pleasure, and we've been getting some hiking in along the sides of NZ's roads along with our biking. The downhills are pretty exciting, though!


The mountains, as we said, are always close by, but the clouds have been so low they've been hitting the mountains at the 2- or 3,000-foot level, and we only get brief glimpses above that, and almost none of the really high peaks a little further back, the ones that get over 10,000 feet. The second photo here is one of the few, and it shows a part of the range that's not quite up at the highest elevations. The forest has been dense with trees we're beginning to recognize, but not always by name. They have names like "white pine" and "beech" but they're not even distantly related to North American pines and beeches.

On one of those "rain delay" days, by the way, we found ourselves in artsy Hokitika. The rain cleared mid-afternoon and we explored an art show of sorts on the beach. The "HOKITIKA" driftwood sculpture has been there for a while, but the snowman made of rocks, mussel shells and pine cones and the dancing driftwood were quite the new additions.

Near Hokitika we also saw one of the more unusual bridges in NZ. Now one-lane bridges are fairly common in NZ. They're a lot cheaper to build and replace, apparently. They have signs at each end letting drivers and cyclists know which direction is favored and which has to yield, or Give Way as Kiwis put it. But this particular bridge also carries the local train line! As you can imagine, we walked it, particularly after seeing a banged up German tourist at the backpacker the day before who made the mistake of trying to ride it and had her bike wheel fall in the crack next to the rail. Also nearby in the old gold-mining town of Ross was a replica of the largest gold nugget ever found in NZ, which acquired the name "The Honourable Roddy." The government eventually bought it and made a gift of it to King Edward, who turned it into a set of dinnerware!

At two places the road comes close to glaciers, Franz Josef Glacier and Fox Glacier. In both cases there's a town on the highway at about 500' elevation, and a 4-6 km unpaved road up to the glaciers themselves. At Franz Josef we hiked through the woods, over the glacial streams, under the rocks and over the rocks,



up to the glacier, or more precisely to as close as you're allowed to go without a guide. Glaciers tend to underwhelm due to all the dirt they pick up and carry, but these two are relatively white as glaciers go, and quite impressive. We'll let the photos of the hike and of the glacier speak for themselves. The glaciers are receding after again after a brief advance in the '60s through the '80s, but they still get down to remarkably low altitudes, well under 1,000'. We were not able to hike right up to the glacier face without a guide, but certainly got near enough to feel their presence. If you click on the closest close-up to enlarge the photo (hit the back button on your browser when you're done to go back), you might see little bug-like people hiking in groups across the glacier, to give you some idea of the scale.

At Fox Glacier, the town, we chose to go in the opposite direction about 6 km on a sealed (paved) road to Lake Matheson, reknowned for the view one gets of Aoraki/Mt. Cook reflecting across the lake. While the clouds were a bit higher than they'd been the day before and the day after, they never did pull back to show off NZ's highest peak, 3754 m (12,316'), so here's our photographic attempt along with one from a nearby sign to show you how it was supposed to look.

As always, getting there was half the fun, with NZ's gorgeous trails taking us through the woods.

We've now reached the town of Haast, the southernmost town on the west coast except for two small communities on the 20-km dead-end road that continues from Haast along the Tasman. The main road now turns inland, up and over the Southern Alps on the lowest crossing, Haast Pass, only 563 m, 1,850'. That's still about 1800 feet higher up than we are right now, so tomorrow we're climbing one-and-a-half Empire State Buildings, more or less. Well, we've done much bigger climbs in the Canadian Rockies, so we're not too worried. What we are worried about is the sandflies. Most are smaller than this specimen we passed along the way, but Boy are they annoying! They are very very tiny, very very numerous, and they bite. This week we've changed our names from Jeff and Louise to Itchy and Scratchy.

What has also worried us these past few days are those three near-disasters reference in the title of today's entry. The first came to our attention when we both felt that the bike was a bit wobblier than it should be. Jeff got out the tool to tighten any screws that might be loose, then uttered a few profanities. The rear carrier is attached to the bike with two brackets near Louise's seat, and also from below at two so-called braze-ons near the rear axle. One of the braze-ons had broken off the bike, and the left leg of the rear carrier was hanging in space just next to the drum brake. The picture shows the broken piece resting for its photo to be taken, on the rear axle just below where it broke off.

Fortunately the other three points held the weight and did not fail with the added stress, but we couldn't keep riding that way. Jeff solved the problem by pulling out his screw collection. About 5 years ago we had a ride almost end in the middle of nowhere when one of the two screws that holds the cleat onto Jeff's bike shoe broke, and there was no way for Jeff to get his foot disengaged from the pedal. We saved that ride by pulling out our one spare cleat screw from the collection! This time, we needed two fairly standard 4 mm bike screws, but longer than usual so we could move the rear carrier struts to the braze-ons that hold the rear fender, and attach both items to the single remaining braze-on on each side. And we did, so we're fine for now so long as we don't have any more braze-on failures, which are quite rare.

Next close call was two days later when Jeff was wheeling the bike to our room and the wheel caught on a curb and toppled away from him. It was a fairly low-impact fall, but enough to break one of the two prongs that holds Jeff's rear-view mirror in place. This is a seriously important piece of safety equipment, as it is essential to know when cars and trucks are about to pass. This time good-ole duct tape saved the day. This goes back to a ride we took almost a decade ago, when a blow-out ruined our rear tire. We had no spare. But another rider had duct tape, and we covered the hole well enough to make it ten miles back to our car. Since then we've had about a yard of duct tape wound around a tire lever, sitting unused in the tool kit. It paid for itself this time and the mirror looks ugly but hey, it does the job once again!

Our third close call is the most serious, and will ultimately require us to buy a new camera. We took a kayak trip yesterday afternoon on Lake Paringa, and it was a beautiful paddle on a big empty lake, just us and a few crested grebes out there. But getting out of the kayak the camera shifted in Jeff's pocket and got pressed in a way it didn't like against the wooden dock. The camera still works, but not the display on the back. We can take photos using the visual viewfinder, but cannot check the results on the video display, or change the settings. Since we need to replace the camera with one that takes SD cards, not a challenge, but that also takes lithium batteries that fit our battery recharger, a big challenge, we may have to make do until we return to Wellington, where there are several good camera shops. Sigh ...

Well, that's the news from Westland. We'll write you next from Queenstown, where bungy jumping was invented and adrenaline is the local drug of choice. But you know us, we're very good at saying no to drugs. Hopefully the drugs will listen.