Archive | New Zealand

With Christmas on its way, I picked what sounded like a perfect campsite from the D.O.C website and started to head towards it.  I had a mountain pass to cross and another to partially cross, so it was another day of tight corners opening up into stunning views. The road coming down towards the coast was especially dramatic and it…

Before I hit the flat lands properly I had some fun riding through recreated historical towns… More impressionist masterpieces… And more scenes from LOTR, this one being close to where they filmed the chase scenes through Rohan to Fangorn forest. I also met up with another rider, though he spent far too much time just staring at the views, so…

It was finally time to ride up to Mount Cook/Aoraki. I honestly wasn’t expecting too much since the weather had been excellent for the last week or so and with less than 70 rain free days a year at the mount and my luck, I figured it was time for the weather to roll in. Guess not. The ride up…

…And left the rest of the world with the bran flakes. Hitting the south coast it was time to do the mandatory ‘Southern Most Point’ pic at Bluff and like most of these points, it’s technically not the southern most point (that honour belongs to Slope Point), but it’s the traditional one, so it gets the pic. I then had…

Off to Milford Sound and another ride down a couple of different memory lanes… My luck was holding out and the normally rainy area was filled with puffy white clouds and warm sunlight.  This, of course, meant plenty of tourist buses, cars, and caravans on the road.  All things that tend act as fun vacuums on bike, but on this…

But focus on what? The next days riding through The Hasst Pass  to the Queenstown area had the lascivious road take second place to the comforting beauty of the scenery. Stops for photos and simple time to immerse yourself in the views was the joy of the day.  Your focus was endlessly torn between the peace of the surroundings and…

When the weather finally cleared I was on the road and heading to the west coast for what I was told was the best tarmac ride in New Zealand. First I had to get through Nelson with it’s closed roads and other problems due to flooding, etc.  They had done an excellent job of getting things cleared up, but there…

Now, as an obvious punishment for doubting the filming choices of Sir Jackson, the heavens opened up again.  I road straight past Mount Taranaki (Egmont) without even catching a glimpse of it.  Wellington wasn’t much better, so a ferry to the sunny South Island seemed like the best choice. As we entered the fjords leading to Picton it seemed that…

Even if you wanted to, which I certainly don’t, it’s impossible to get away from The Lord of The Rings movies in New Zealand.  Peter Jacksons trilogy was more than a masterful book adaptation, it cemented New Zealands place as a land of unsurpassed natural beauty in the eyes of the world.  The first of the iconic sights I was…

After traveling around for so long (or just getting older I suppose), you get used to your mind traveling without you.  Almost any simple sight can teleport you back to another time and place- a memory forgotten brought back in an instant.  Some of these flashes are simple visual similarities with other places you’ve visited.  Others can sweep you away…