Update From The Oddsmaker

“We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.”

—Charles Bukowski

I ran across this quote at the Lazy Cow, a funky little backpackers in Murchison where I stayed on Friday to do some laundry, writing, and route planning. It was an easy riding day, only 33 km, but with plenty of fun little moments. Four river crossings, and six more on Saturday.

Nothing major, certainly nothing that warrants taking all the baggage off and walking it across. (That did happen in Tasmania.) On these narrow winding mountain trails, the fords are fast and narrow too. You get a good head of steam on the downhill leading into them, then lose all that momentum to the water and you have to slog up the hill on the other side. If you want to keep your shoes from getting soaked, you can take your chances and hold your feet way up high off the pedals like you’re on one of those saucer sleds.

Ten childish careening river crossings in two days is living life so well that death will tremble to take us. So is staying at a backpackers where the rooms don’t have numbers, they have named cows. (I stayed in Clover.) So is eating an entire pizza in one sitting at the Cow Shed, the warm and cozy restaurant next to the Lazy Cow.

Now, having run across that Bukowski quote, I wonder if the whole point of this odyssey is to laugh at the odds. That said, I’ve got to give you new odds on whether I finish. A month or so ago I told you to bet everything you’ve got against me. Now I think it’s 50/50, maybe even 51/49 in my favor.

At no point did I think I could make it all the way to Bluff, and in fact I deliberately put any thought of that out of my mind. But then I set foot on the South Island. At that moment it hit me: maybe I can do this. I’m more than halfway. I’m standing on the same land Bluff is on. I just have to get to the other end.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s still a big job. Booster’s getting parts replaced left and right, and of course I have yet to receive replacements or repairs myself. I’ve had maybe six or seven falls bad enough to draw blood, and not a single serious injury. That’s a lucky streak that can’t last—or maybe it can, if I laugh at it and keep living well.

Every mile of the road ahead is an unknown. That’s why you have to laugh at the odds: because otherwise you don’t go. I place my odds at 51/49 because while I finally believe I’m physically and psychologically capable of this, the proof is still in the pudding. I think the possibility of an adventure-ending injury is still out there. I’ll keep laughing, though, and keep trying to make death tremble.

Scavenger Hunt: North Island Edition

My Tour Aotearoa guidebooks give me a list of photos to collect as I ride. “Checkpoints,” they call them, though that seems a bit stern to me. Maybe for official racers it’s the right term, but I prefer scavenger hunt.

1. Cape Reinga.

2. Ninety Mile Beach. Only sixty miles long.

2 1/2. The Bluff, halfway along Ninety Mile Beach. Not on the official list but wild horses can’t be held back.

3. Tane Mahuta. That’s one big-ass tree. Easy to believe it belongs to a god.

4. Matakohe Post Office and Telegraph Station. The alternate route photo point when the Pouto Point ferry is closed.

5. Mount Eden, Auckland. Believe it or not, this is the nicest photo I got. The summit was a rainy, foggy miasma.

6. Waikato cows. In this case, kattle kindergarten.

7. Matamata iSITE. An iSITE is a tourist information center, and this one is in the neighboring town to Hobbiton. As it’s above ground, it’s not a hobbit hole. Very important to get that straight. Hobbits build more than just holes.

8. Centrepoint of the North Island. Not centerpoint.

9. Ongarue Spiral, Timber Trail.

10. The Bridge To Nowhere. This is as close as I could get to the Bridge, because of the trail closing. (Still thanking my lucky stars for that. Today I met a rider who was there on the 2020 ride when someone crashed and punctured a lung. Not the way I want to spend my sabbatical!)

11. Durie Hill Elevator Lookout, Whanganui. Another lookout spoiled by a dreary, rainy day.

12. Totara Reserve. Not a particularly scenic part of the ride. I’d have chosen Whanganui National Park myself.

12 1/2. Whanganui National Park. See?

13. Giant Kiwi, Eketahuna. As a philosopher it troubles me that Eketahuna’s slogan is “Real Kiwi Country” yet its most iconic landmark is a fake kiwi.

14. Summit Tunnel on Rimutaka Rail Trail. First commissioned by Elrond Halfelven, 3,000 years before the invention of the railroad.

15. Cook Strait from the ferry. Yet another dismal day for legendary lookouts. The weather did clear a little once I was off the ferry:

Fifteen more to come! South Island, here we go.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Philosophically speaking, I think Thanksgiving is my country‘s best holiday. Historically speaking we all know there are problems, but the idea of celebrating gratitude—and taking time to be mindful of what to be grateful for—is lovely.

I had a lot to be grateful for this Thanksgiving. The day started as one of those it’s hard to appreciate: cold, rainy, strong westerly winds when I had to ride west. Destination: Lake Rotoroa, which is famous for being infested by sandflies. I looked them up, wondering if that’s what kiwis call sand fleas. Nope. Worse. It’s the kiwi name for blackflies. If you aren’t familiar with blackflies, they are reason enough to believe in Satan and Hell. Worse than mosquitoes. And I’m supposed to spend my Thanksgiving biking down the barrel of a strong, rainy westerly, straight to Sandfly Mecca.

But there’s no day so bad that a compooter can’t make it worse. My GPS has been behaving like a reliable ally for a while now, lulling me into a false sense of security. Thursday morning I made the mistake of trusting it. 16 kilometers later, I had ridden 15 kilometers up the wrong valley.

On any other day, this would have been annoying. Riding into a cold rainy headwind, it was a kick in the nuts. But what could I do other than ride back where I started from?

Where I started from was the little town of Tapawera, aka “Tap.” I was told not to camp in Tap because meth heads have a habit of stealing locked bikes from the campgrounds. So Wednesday night I’d booked a room in kind of a dump, with neighbors so obnoxious I had to switch to a room at the opposite end of the parking lot car park. Now, back in Tap after 32 pointless kilometers through the hills, I had to choose: push on or quit.

Quitting had a certain appeal. I’d done it a few days before, when I took the train to Wellington. My saddle had failed mightily: in just five months, less than 1,500 miles, I wore out not just the cushioning but also the steel itself. See that gel padding? It’s not supposed to have thumb-sized depressions in it. See those steel rails? They’re supposed to be straight.

So my ass has been putting up with one uncomfortable seat for who knows how long. I quit outside Wellington because I could feel my femur rolling over my sciatic nerve. I found a seat cushion in Wellie, but no new saddle until 60 miles later in Richmond. My sciatic nerve is glowing red at this point; a rest day will do it some good. Even a rest day in Tap.

So that’s option one: quit. Take the same ride tomorrow, extra vigilant this time. Option two: retry today’s ride right now. Oh hell no. Not even gonna think about it. Only the Worst Bikepacker in New Zealand can fret about tacking a mere 32 km onto a day’s ride, especially if the goal that day is a modest 66 km. But I’m slow. My all-time record is 83. I sure as hell don’t want to shoot for 98 on a day like this.

Option three: go to the campground and see about this crystal meth situation. I’ve never tried it. Maybe it’s good for sciatic pain.

Option four: go to the grocery store to buy some ingredients for Thanksgiving dinner. There, discover it is oddly full of young, smiling Dutch  women. Ask them what they’re doing here and watch them point to the giant green hop-on/hop-off intercity tour bus. Then meet Fraser, driver of said bus, which can seat 55 and Fraser has 54 passengers. Is he going anywhere near Lake Rotoroa? Kinda sorta. He can get me within 30 km. Does he have room for a bicycle too? Barely, if we pull the wheels off and carefully lay it and them atop a bunch of Dutch luggage. Or, far easier, just park it in the stairwell.

So there I am in a front row seat on a bus headed south, Booster tucked away as securely as if the stairwell was built for her, with a horde of happy Dutch women admiring her and asking me all about my ride. It warms a middle-aged heart to get such attention.

Better still, I got no attention at all from the sandflies. There was a time when I’d have said this is blasphemy, claiming indifferent insects are better than affectionate women with foreign accents, but I stand by it. Fawning women are a young man’s game. I’ll take a zipped tent with a cooked dinner inside and all the bitey bugs outside.

I don’t know how to account for my apparent truce with the sandflies. Wild Man Chizo recommended vitamin B1 against mosquitoes, and I’ve been taking that ever since. Maybe it works. Or maybe it was the head net, winter gloves, pant legs tucked into the socks, bug spray, and seething waves of hatred for mozzies and all their kin. I don’t know. I just know to be thankful.

The rest of the ride wasn’t too bad. I was slated for 66 km on the day and I rode 66. Not the right 66, but I started and ended just where I intended to. And I got out of the rain for about a mile, in NZ’s longest bikeable railway tunnel. (Fifth longest in the world!)

As for dinner, I did pretty well for a guy who subsists mostly on peanut M&Ms. Kumara isn’t exactly a Thanksgiving staple but it’s close: a sweet potato brought to NZ by the Māori 800 years ago. (Did you know they sailed all the way to South America? Wild.) Sweet potato plus some cranberries and a couple of churkey legs* sounds pretty Thanksgivingy to me.

*Cheddar carved up to look like turkey.

THANKSGIVING DINNER MENU

• Pan-seared chili cinnamon kumara

• Garlic smashed other half of kumara

• Dried cranberries

• Pumpkin soup

• Churkey legs

• Deconstructed French silk pie (i.e. candy bar with no silk, pie crust, or Frenchmen added)

Halfway, Baby!

I made it to Wellington! Southernmost port of the North Island, 1,494 km (928 miles) from the Cape Reinga lighthouse, hometown of Sir Peter Jackson, only airport in the world with giant eagles. I didn’t hitch a ride with any feathered, overgrown deus ex machina to get this far, but I did cheat a teeny bit and take the train after a mechanical failure.

But please don’t hold the cheating against me, because I rode 1,591 km (988 miles) to get here. Two detours extended my ride beyond the official TA route: I rode the long way around Kaipara Harbor (the ferry wasn’t running) and I took the please-don’t-kill-me Kaiwhakauka Track instead of the would-have-killed-me Mangapurua Track (trail closed due to washout). Those more than offset my train ride and my hot springs hitchhike of three weeks ago.

Three weeks ago! Yeesh, has it been that long? It feels like I just started, and yet it feels like I haven’t been home in forever. But yeah, looking back, I started in Reinga on October 21, did my hitchhiking stint about a week after that, and reached Wellington on November 20. That’s about half the speed of the other TAers I’ve met, but nearly twice the speed I was managing on Tasmania.

My uncle Tim asked me if New Zealand really is that much more benign than Tassie, since nothing has really tried to kill me here. I’ve been thinking ever since about how to account for the difference, because he’s right: the TT kicked my ass every day, and the TA hasn’t. Here’s my best guess as to what’s different:

• I’m a stronger rider. I didn’t train nearly hard enough for this whole adventure, but the TT was good training for the TA.

• There’s pavement. I saw almost no sealed roads on the TT until the final two days, whereas the TA has me on sealed roads almost every day. Gravel is an energy vampire. I reckon the difference in efficiency is somewhere around 25% (meaning the resources I spend to ride 20 miles on gravel get me about 25 miles on pavement).

• No hypothermia. When you take that off the table, everything gets more efficient. Taking breaks on Tassie often meant changing from wet clothes into dry clothes to mitigate heat loss. Intellectually I understand it doesn’t take that much time to change shirts, but somehow psychologically it just seems like one more hassle, which makes me want to take fewer breaks, which gets me to…

• I quit. Way earlier now than I did on Tassie, way more often. I still hear that little voice that says, come on, one more push, just to the top of that next hill, but now I’m much more willing to tell it to shut up.

• One does not simply bike into Mordor. Tasmania is a lot more like Mordor than the North Island. The land itself is harsher. The slopes are steeper, the wind bites deeper, there is evil there that does not sleep. Booster actually weighs more there, because here in NZ there’s almost always a farmhouse within a few kilometers and I’m not shy about knocking on doors to ask if I can top up a water bottle. Water is bloody heavy and here I never carry more than a liter.

• I’m no longer harboring the enemy. My old GPS compooter was an active hindrance. There were days it doubled how far I had to ride. Even the compass was off. My new compooter is almost always wrong, but I can tell what it’s trying to do. It can’t find my route, but once I find it myself, it tends to stay on it. When it says I’m headed the wrong direction, I push on a few hundred meters and it self-corrects. In short, it’s terrible at what it’s supposed to do but it doesn’t sabotage the whole mission.

• I’m better at this. Tassie was a baptism by fire. There were a lot of hard lessons there, right from day one. The GPS problems, the flat tire, little hiccups about things like food shopping or fuel rationing, details I didn’t know to pay attention to then that I’m always cognizant of now. Even packing more intelligently is a big advantage.

The fact is, the TT would kick my ass again if I rode it today, as the Kaiwhakauka Track proved a few days ago. (Was it a week already? Jeez.) But I’d recover from the ass-kickings better, and the TA just isn’t the ass-kicker the TT was. In truth is it’s more dangerous, inasmuch as I’m in traffic a lot more here than I was there. But inattentive drivers are nothing to write home about—so far! fingers crossed—so they’re not making it onto the blog.

I Saw My Girl!

Last week I stopped through “Palmy,” full name Palmerston North, which sounds less like a city and more like someone Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity would hang out with. "Excuse me, Palmerston, could you hand me my MAGA hat?" seems like a thing one could say. But Palmy is not a man in a bow tie and boat shoes. It's a little city in the lower North Island, home to an excellent bike shop (shout-out to Central Bicycle Studio) that just so happens to have a cavernous five bedroom, two bath Airbnb right around the corner. So I got me a hot shower and Goldilocksed my way through the flat, deciding which bed was just right, while Booster got some serious upgrades.

Embiggened rotors for better stopping power, new brake pads to go with them, a new feedbag to replace the torn one that's been holding on for dear life, a replacement chain, a replacement for the Voile strap that tangled itself around my rear axle and snapped, a new phone holder that (I hope) won't lose its grip on my Advanced Alien Technology whenever it rains, new grips (the old ones slip loose when it rains), and a pair of cycling gloves (the new grips aren't paddy enough). $800 all told, but the New Zealand dollar is still getting crushed by the US dollar, so this whole country is basically on a 40% off sale for me. Most importantly, I found the one bike shop that had almost everything in stock and somehow got all the rest by 9:00 the following morning. (Double shout-out to Central Bike Studio.)

The other great thing about Palmy was the wifi was good enough that I could see my sweet girl Cocoa, who I haven't seen since August. A couple of days before she and I left Dayton, she was attacked by a neighbor's dog. She had already torn a cruciate ligament in her knee, and this fight cost her the other one. (My knees are purple with scars too, from rolling around in the street fighting to get her free.) ACL surgery on a dog runs about $7000, and even if I had $14K to spare, I can't see spending it on an aging dog's knees. The recommendation from the emergency room vet was to put her down, which gutted me. So thank you, lucky stars, for the second vet, who saw a path forward for Cocoa. With a lot of care and an incremental recovery plan, she might be able to chase rabbits again—though not catch them, which suits me fine. I'm vegetarian, dammit! I did not sign up to carry all the dead animals Cocoa leaves in her murderous wake.

Anyway, the last I saw her, Cocoa could barely stand. I could carry her outside and gingerly set her down to pee, and that's all the physical activity she could handle. Ever since then, I’ve been bracing myself for the worst: coming home to find her permanently hobbling in pain. So you can imagine my relief when I saw her on FaceTime for the first time in two months, tail wagging at full speed, walking around as if nothing happened. I'm told she has a little trouble sitting down—she kind of hovers her butt a bit before getting settled—but what I saw was a happy and healthy dog.

It's so much more than I dared hope for. It was nice to see family too, of course, and to walk them around my luxurious flat, catch them up on my ride, blah blah blah. But seeing Cocoa is definitely the highlight of my week. (And this week includes a giant kiwi, so that's saying something!)

A Shortcut To Strawberries

Here's one of the little moments you can't have when you're traveling by tour bus and don't often take advantage of when traveling by car. I'm riding along today, ahead of schedule and wondering what I'll do with my day, when I see a farm with a sign advertising fresh eggs. Hard boiled eggs are my new favorite camp food, and I have a gas canister that's nearly empty. So I stop and ask them if there's anywhere I could set up to cook.

Sure enough, the young woman working the counter takes me around the barn to the arbor, where there's a well crafted, little used picnic table in the shade. She shows me the hose tap right there on the side of the barn, where I can top off my water bottle and fill my pot to boil my eggs. I buy half a dozen and also a little tub of the most beautiful strawberries you'll ever see. We’re talking the Platonic form of strawberriness.

It turns out I still have half my dinner from last night (a box mix of Moroccan couscous with a little cucumber and tomato chopped in there), so today for lunch I have couscous, a lovely farm-fresh egg, and a small mountain of perfect strawberries. Pretty damn good for a guy who usually eats peanut M&Ms for lunch, eh?

It turns out the rest of the strawberries fit perfectly in the egg container, which, if I turn it upside down, snuggles in pretty nicely under the bungee cord over Booster's rump. Obviously storage would have been much easier in a car, but when I'm traveling by car I almost never stop for moments like this. Not at highway speed, anyway. I think I need to reconsider that.

#TBT: Learning Bicyclese

I've been meaning to write about this one ever since the first week on the Tasmanian Trail, when I first started learning the language of the bicycle. As a bike commuter I thought I knew a fair bit of it, but as with any foreign language, you can't really become fluent without daily immersion.

#

When people see Booster fully loaded, lots of them want to talk. Many of the questions are predictable: where are you from, where are you headed, how long will it take you, yadda yadda yadda. If the conversation goes longer, we get to the second-tier questions: do you have a repair kit, do you listen to music, what do you mean you don't listen to music, and so on.

I don't listen to music—or podcasts, or my usual go-to, standup comedy—for three reasons. Most important is mindfulness. I came down here to pare away the distractions of Normal Life in order to learn a thing or two about myself. Second is I don't know any of the birds down here and sans phone I get to listen to them sing all day. (Kookaburra laughter is bananas.) Third—which I'm sure my family would like to put first—is safety. I need to hear the cars coming.

A big perk of not hitting the play button is learning Booster's language. It's a part of the mindfulness bit, just being with the bike. The easiest to learn are her complaints. Clicking in the drivetrain is worth looking at later, crunching down there is worrisome now, squeaking shouldn’t happen because she ought to be waxed up. Squeaking from the pedals, no big deal. Sometimes it's just my shoe against the crank arm. (Bad foot placement, a rookie mistake. Worst Bikepacker coming right up.) Sometimes it’s one well-placed bird that sounds exactly like a squeaking pedal. I haven’t identified the species yet, but the resemblance is uncanny.

Then there’s her rhythmic speech. A continual ting-ting-ting is the brake rotor speaking up. Give the lever a light squeeze. If the ting-tinging goes away, there was something on the rotor. (Happens a lot on singletrack, after rain, or anywhere there are livestock—which has been surprisingly common on this ride.) Problem solved: you just knocked it loose. If it doesn't go away, give it a look-see the next time you stop. You might have bent the rotor, usually not a major problem but one worth addressing eventually. It’s not hard to fix.

A rhythmic vubbavubbavubbavubba means something’s rubbing on the tire. Stop immediately and find it, otherwise whatever it is, you’ll wear a hole in it. On Booster, the usual suspects are either the little loop on my Nalgene bottle (no biggie; I’ll just have to buy a new lid a little sooner) or my tent pole bag (yes biggie; poles won’t fall out of a tire-width hole, but stakes will).

A rhythmic whap-whap-whap means something's dangling loose and hitting the tire. Stop right now. A strap or drawstring lassoing a spoke could be real trouble.

A rhythmic whiff-whiff-whiff is a homophone, and it could mean a couple of things. Sometimes the little tool boxes I've got in the bottom of the frame bag don't sit quite right, creating a bulge. When that rubs a crank arm, it goes whiff. When groceries settle oddly, it’ll be higher up in the frame bag, making a bulge that goes whiff when it hits a pant leg. Frame bag versus pant leg is no big deal; you just wear out your pants a little faster. But frame bag versus metal crank arm wears a hole in the bag, and that’s a real pain in the ass to patch. (Especially since whatever you patch it with is next up to get worn down by the crank arm.)

Fortunately, whiff-whiff-whiff is easy to parse. Just bow your legs out and see if it goes away. Much harder to translate—the most perplexing riddle so far—was her high-pitched rhythmic squeaking coming from somewhere right in front of me. It wasn’t the brakes, wasn’t the tire, wasn’t any of her straps, clips, or buckles. It matched the rhythm of my pedaling but had no relationship to the wheel’s RPMs. That’s damned odd, because usually pedaling and speed are besties. They go together.

Turns out it was the handlebar bag squeaking against the headtube. (That’s the vertical bit right below the handlebars.) I don’t know how it’s possible for me not to have known this, but in all the years I’ve been riding, I just assumed my handlebars stayed pretty even. After all, I stay pretty even. I’m not wobbling down the road. But as any good Daoist can tell you, balance is not a fixed state. It’s dynamic, ever-changing, and so are the handlebars. They roll left and right as I pedal, just the teeniest bit, but enough to make an overstuffed handlebar bag squeak.

I never noticed this on my commuter bike because, well, it doesn’t have a handlebar bag. Neither has any bike I’ve ever owned prior to Booster. Like I said, daily immersion is the key.

Another thing I’m not sure I ever noticed is how swiftly and completely I become deaf to her language at speed. As slow as I am, usually I don’t have to worry about that, but starting around 25 miles per hour the wind gets loud enough to drown out everything Booster has to say. I also can’t hear cars even when they’re right on my ass.

Which happens a lot at high speed, because my slow ass only tops 20 mph on a good downhill. In NZ “a good downhill” is usually a long string of serpentine curves where I can hit 30 or 35 mph if I don’t chicken out. At those speeds I don’t stay on the shoulder and hope no one clips me. I take the whole lane. You want to pass me, you pass me like I’m a car.

I know I shouldn’t be astonished by repeated behavior, but to this day it still surprises me how many people cannot figure out how to get their motorcar to pass a bicycle. If that’s you, I suggest using the neighboring empty lane and your gas pedal. You might even consider your turn signal. Any driver who can’t figure that out deserves to be stuck behind me.

Still, it would be better if I could hear them back there when I’m leaning into those curves at top speed. Or if not hear them, then at least see them. I gotta get me one of those mirrors I’ve been hearing so much about.

The Uncontested Life Is Not Worth Living

I’m finally starting to see other TAers on the trail! So far all of them have slowed a little to chat before blowing right past me. As well they should, if they want to reach Bluff within the unofficial 30-day time limit that makes you “count” as having finished. To do that, they need to average 100 km a day; my average is 60.

If this were a competition, I would look at their lighter loads and figure out what I need to cut. (Most are equipped for touring, not bikepacking—i.e. hotels, not tents. Not one of them has a ukulele.) If it were a serious competition, I’d have trained for it. But doing that would miss the entire point of riding the TA.

Plan A for this trip was to buy a campervan, then sell it when I left. Had I done that, the point of coming down here would have been to see New Zealand. Then I struck upon Plan B: Booster. With her, the point of this adventure is to find my limits and blow right past them. So if I’d trained adequately for the TA, I couldn’t ride it. I would have to find something harder.

This has been plenty hard. I’ve crossed the three week mark and the 1,200 km mark.(Only 1,800 to go!) I’m happy to say it took three weeks to find three hours where I didn’t enjoy the ride. Of my 1,200 km thus far, there’s a 40 km zig-zag of steep climbs and slippery switchbacks called the Kaiwhakauka-Mangapurua Trail. (If you can say that five times fast, you deserve a gold star.) It was on the Kaiwhakauka that I found the absolute upper limit of my ability.

The Kaiwhakauka is, shockingly, the less perilous half. The Department of Conservation has closed the Mangapurua section. Too dangerous, too many washouts. They’re both grade 4 MTB tracks, and as you may remember, the grade 3 Timber Trail threw me from the saddle twice. I wrote in my journal afterward “Do not even attempt grade 4.” But the only alternative is just as death-defying: 55 km on a busy highway with no shoulder. I figured at least I could hike-a-bike the Kaiwhakauka.

Right at the beginning there’s a stretch of 11 km—six miles—that’s as hard as anything I rode in Tasmania. It took me three hours to hike-a-bike that six miles.

Usually when you hike-a-bike you and your steed are walking abreast, but most of this trail is too narrow for that. Instead I’m directly behind her, my right arm at maximum extension so I can use her rear brake to keep her from rolling back down on me. Here’s an example of why: a patch of trail so washed out it’s not even as wide as my handlebars.

When I took this photo, I had no idea this would be one of the wider portions of those first six miles. I also hadn’t foreseen a twenty-foot stretch so daunting it would take five minutes to cross. Sorry, no picture for you there. Photos don’t convey steepness at all. I’ll sum it up this way: imagine trying to put your bike on top of a picnic table but you have to do it while sitting on the ground.

A big part of the trouble was that it rained all evening the day before. My trusty guidebook specifically says the first 11 km are especially dangerous after a heavy rain. Nice for rainbows but it turns that track into a Slip N Slide.

In fact, the guidebook undersells it. When you reach this particular 11 km stretch, you get new warning labels. In 2020, the last time they ran the TA as an official race, three riders got helicoptered off the mountain with broken bones. In 2019, more helicopters, more broken bones, and one fatality. Hence “Do not even attempt grade 4.”

Fast-forward to me, Booster, and the mud-slicked, picnic-table-sized boulder smack in the middle of the trail. We can’t go side by side. The trail is too narrow for that. And I can’t push her any higher because there’s not a single decent foothold to be found.

This twenty feet was so slick and so steep that if I’d brought a longer rope, I would have rigged a pulley to hoist Booster up. But my rope is just for hanging clothes and tying tourniquets, so no work-smarter-not-harder for me. In the end I pushed her straight up the mountain, where at least we could gain some purchase on the underbrush.

The Kaiwhakauka beat me. The only way to press on was to abandon it. Maybe that was working smarter, not harder, but it was still pretty fucking hard.

And that gets me back to the earlier point: why my training rides were for perfecting Booster’s gear load-out, not conditioning my legs and lungs to average 100 km a day. The reason I came down here was not to live up to my potential. It was to increase the upper limit of that potential. Better cardio can’t do that. The mud-slicked boulder did that. That whole miserable six-mile stretch did that. Three hours, half of it spent resting, marshaling energy for the next push. When I finally got past it, I unfurled my tent’s groundsheet and slept.

Yes, I know, Worst Bikepacker here. I suck at this. If I were good at it, this would be a vacation, not an adventure. The only thing I can really say for myself is I’m getting better. A little. Back in Tasmania, on the Wellington range, I didn’t quit early enough. That’s why I needed police helicopters. This time I did quit, at least long enough to catch a nap before attempting the next 30 km of trail. And look ma, no helicopters! So yeah, Worst Bikepacker in New Zealand, but a little better than I was before.

Timber Trail Pt. II: Sparring Match vs. Street Fight

In the previous post I made the bold claim that in mountain biking downhill is harder than uphill. There’s nothing bold about saying it’s harder on the body, because it’s only riding downhill that you have any weight in your hands and shoulders. Sooner or later the rattling is going to wear on you. But which one is harder on the mind is debatable. It depends to some extent on personal taste. Or rather, personal dread.

Here’s the thing about biking uphill: you’re not going to get hurt. When you round a corner and see the climb is longer and steeper than you expected, it’s definitely a blow to morale. But you’re not going to break anything. You can stop whenever you want.

That’s not true riding downhill. On sealed roads, of course, downhill is a breeze. But mountain bike trails require all kinds of technical skills, and one of the many factors that make me the Worst Bikepacker in New Zealand is I haven’t learned those skills. Dodging tree limbs is easy enough. Cornering in wet gravel down a steep switchback is something else entirely. Stopping before you reach the turn isn’t even up to you sometimes. Sometimes it’s up to physics

There must be a specific skill for taking those hairpin turns. I can tell because they’re all built the same. There’s clearly a right way to approach them. And then there’s my way to approach them, which is to slow waaaaay down and maybe use my tippy toes if the mood strikes.

I really don’t know what the hell I’m doing out there, which means I spend about half the time with the mantra don’t go over the handlebars don’t go over the handlebars running through my head. And for good reason. The Timber Trail sent me over the handlebars twice. In both cases it’s because I got cocky and built up too much speed, and in both cases I got off light. No serious injuries, but luck didn’t have to break that way.

Again, Worst Bikepacker in New Zealand here. This is not an especially difficult trail. Grade 3, intermediate, but with a few days of rain and a heavy load, my brakes are not everything I could hope for. The next time I get to a decent bike shop, Booster’s getting bigger rotors. I thought hers were pretty good, but on the Timber Trail I got a look at what some of these e-bikes have. They’re practically frisbees.

I got to ride an e-bike for the first time, by the way. In camp I got to talking with another rider and he let me test drive his. Holy shit are those things fun! (This one was $10,000, so it better be.) You can climb anything, and in turbo mode you can do it fast. I can see getting one if there’s ever a 90% off sale.

But circling around to the original point, to me biking uphill is like a friendly sparring match. Sure, sometimes you get your ass kicked, but nobody’s getting hurt. Biking downhill on sealed roads is like resting between rounds. Easy peasy. But descending MTB trails is like a street fight. It will probably go okay if you have the right skills, but things can still go south. And if they do, your life can get real bad real quick.

So uphill is worse than down if you have the right skill set. Or if you’re young enough to still believe you’re immortal. Me, I’ve got too many battle scars and not enough technical tricks.

Speaking of circling around, the tail end of the Timber Trail has a feature I’ve never seen before. It loops under itself. With a couple of bridges and a tunnel through the mountain, it spirals down and exits beneath the entrance. Obviously this means dwarves like mountain biking. No one else would mine a bike trail through stone.

Timber Trail Pt. I: Curse Your Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal

The Timber Trail is one of New Zealand’s most famous mountain bike trails. 82 kilometers, 1,550 meters of elevation gain, a two-day ride for most who attempt it. (That’s 51 miles long and a mile of elevation gain for you non-metrics. Two days is still two days.) If you’re riding the Tour Aotearoa, add another 50 km and 600 meters of elevation to get to the Trail from the sleepy little village of Mangakino.

This is the third most difficult thing I attempted last weekend.

Nearly all the elevation gain is from Mangakino to the trailhead. Still, it only ranks third. Check it out in my guidebook:

(By the way, those penciled-in numbers are my cumulative distance ridden so far. To put them in the appropriate context for this blog, Frodo and Sam walked 732 km from Hobbiton to Rivendell. My total ride from Cape Reinga to Bluff is almost exactly the distance from the Shire to Mount Doom.)

The most difficult thing I attempted this weekend, which I still have not achieved, is getting on the interwebs. I bought a dumbphone just to be a hotspot for my smartphone, so I could do things like know where the hell I’m going. For four weeks this worked great. Then it stopped. Inexplicably. Not even Young People have been able to fix it.

Not a major problem. It would be nice to text with family and get caught up with the blog (still a week behind), but otherwise the only inconvenience is I don’t have GPS. My GPS compooter is supposed to have that well in hand, right?

Sadly not. It’s much better than the last one: it worked for almost two weeks before its sudden but inevitable betrayal. Nevertheless, it’s a functional compass and odometer, which is all I need to confirm where I am in my guidebooks.

But for the Timber Trail, not even a guidebook is necessary. It is almost oppressively well marked, with milestones (kilometerstones?) the whole way and signposts at almost every turn. It’s also hard to get lost when you know your only job is to bike all the way up, then all the way down.

The climb is breathtaking in every sense. The first bridge to cross is chainlink fence bent into a long, skinny taco about four inches narrower than Booster’s handlebars. We had to go single file, me backwards and her forwards, with all her bags left behind for a second and third trip. I can carry them all in one go but the bridge is too tippy not to have a hand free.

The bridges along the Trail itself are much sturdier, as they see so much more traffic. But they’re still thrilling to cross. They’re like a spiderweb in the first phase of construction, one main line with a few offshoots to anchor it. Strong as steel, thank goodness, but it still feels like walking a tightrope. And the tightrope is a good 100 feet over the rushing river below.

What goes up must come down, of course, and the descent takes the silver medal for most difficult things I tried this weekend. Even after my near-disastrous experience on the Tasmanian Trail, it still surprises me that downhill is so much harder than up. But this post is already overly long, so I’ll save that tale for next time.

Paeroa Pt. II: Parks and Rec

Peeking out from under the rain fly, I was happy to see I had not only Booster’s rear tire but also the rest of her, still attached. I also saw a gigantic red lawnmower coming straight for me.

After bike thieves, this is the second most common predator targeting urban bikepackers: the Department of Parks and Recreation. They came for me in Dargaville too, where I camped out behind a community center. And once in Tasmania, come to think of it, on a rugby pitch in Judbury. Their M.O. is a friendly drive-by, loud enough and close enough to be your alarm clock. Then they go about their business while you frantically shove stuff in dry bags to sort out later.

My default assumption—and this is fear culture talking again—is that they’d be pissed at me for making their job harder. A general principle I try to live by is don’t make people’s jobs harder. So in all three cases I apologized, and all three times the answer was perfectly friendly. It turns out they mow their lawns the same way I do mine: I don’t care which corner I start in or where I finish, so long as it’s all the same length when I get done.

Maybe it speaks to a lack of faith in humanity that I assume the response will be annoyance, not indifference. Truth to tell, if I woke up one day to find you camped out in my front yard, I wouldn’t care. Just don’t make a mess. But these riding mower drive-bys have me wondering about how we think about the homeless.

On a technicality I’m homeless. Homeless but not addressless, let’s say. I’ve rented my house out, so I have no home to return to. And maybe if people who work for the city found me camped out behind the grocery store ten nights in a row, they would lump me in with “the homelessness problem“ and not “weird tourists.” But I’m also the beneficiary of other things that would really benefit homeless people.

People just offer me food. It usually starts when they see me on the bike, maybe in a parking lot or at a campground. They ask questions, we get to talking, they give me food. But in one case, there were no introductions; a van just pulled up on the road and the passenger offered me cookies. It happens so often that I’ve started buying fewer groceries. Less weight to schlep uphill.

I haven’t asked for any of this, by the way. My best guess is people see I’m doing something difficult and they want to help.

But living on the street is difficult too. A hell of a lot harder than what I’m doing. It might be a less comfortable conversation for you, but you could ask those folks the same questions people ask me: where did you come from, how does your family keep track of you, are you by yourself, what does your family think of this, etc. Or you could just drive up and give people cookies. Or—and this happens to me too sometimes—you could cook lunch on the spot and invite them to join you.

I know, I know, handouts aren’t a panacea. The problem is more complex than that. And really what I’m thinking about isn’t “the homelessness problem.“ It’s compassion.

The major writing I’m doing on this sabbatical is about compassion. I won’t bore you with the academic minutiae, except to say I have unanswered questions about how we extend compassion to others. What is it about a heavily laden bicycle that makes that easy? Is it just the appeal of novelty? The fact that you don’t see this often? Do people think it’s kind of a cool story and they want to be a part of it?

I mean, obviously it helps that I’m just so goddamn handsome. And charming. And humble. But that can’t be all of it.

Does it matter that my homelessness is entirely voluntary? That it has a foreseeable end date? That’s not true of everybody who sleeps outdoors in quaint Paeroa. But shouldn’t that make it less likely for people to just randomly give me food? Or have I totally misjudged their motives? Maybe I look more haggard than I think. Maybe they think I’m about to keel over if they don’t feed me.

I don’t know. I do know I should recalibrate my faith in humanity. My last interaction in Paeroa was with a muscular, macho, heavily tattooed guy whose wallet probably says Bad Motherfucker. I had stopped to fill Booster’s water bottles and he walked straight at me with purpose. There are places in the world where what happens next is a bike theft. But not here. This guy says, “You don’t want to drink that, mate. Those campervans, they wash out their toilets here.” He hurried to get to me because he didn’t want me to get sick.

Paeroa Pt. I: How To Get Your Bike Stolen

Here’s one of those things you are never, ever supposed to do: urban bike camping. One of the perennial questions on bikepacking forums is what to do about bike security. In one sense the question is oxymoronic: there’s really no such thing as a securely locked bike. I know of a case where instead of disabling the lock, the thieves put the entire bike rack in the bed of a pickup truck, bicycle still attached, and just drove away. The fact is, the only way to prevent a determined thief from stealing your bike is to make sure the thief never has prolonged access to it.

So in the most important sense, the question is not oxymoronic. The security question is how much of a pain in the ass you can make it to steal your bike so the thief just moves on to somebody else’s. And anyway, I don’t care about determined bike thieves. They’re a given. I’m more worried about dumbass fourteen-year-olds indulging an impulse or showing off to their friends. I don’t care what country you’re in or what the crime rate is there; fourteen-year-olds are impulsive dumbasses the world over.

One of the most touted maxims on the bikepacking forums is never let your bicycle out of your sight. It’s a nice idea, but I have questions for these people about where they poop.   The more practical advice on the forums is about little things you can do to prevent the quick grab-n-go kind of theft. And some of these are simple, creative, and cheap. Leave it parked in its highest gear, so it’s hard to ride away. Better still, take the chain off the chain ring. Dialing it up a notch, remove the pedals. Quick release saddles and wheels are no longer in fashion; they’re just another easily stolen thing to worry about.

Obviously you can lock your bike too, but that runs afoul of another perennial bikepacking concern: how to keep weight down. Locks that actually work are heavy. Lightweight locks are basically toys. But I have one anyway, basically a steel zip-tie with a combination lock on one end. It’s one step above wishful thinking but it helps me keep that fear culture instinct in check.

Far more effective, I think—and I actually heard it go off the other day—is my hypersensitive motion detector alarm. If you so much is nudge that bike, it erupts with a loud electronic burp, and if you do it again it wails like a banshee. I’m sure a thief with a well-trained eye knows the product and how to silence it, but impulsive dumbass teenagers might not.

By far the most important security measure one can take is to never, ever park your bike in a public place overnight. Darkness + plenty of time = bike thief heaven. And that’s the rule I broke. I camped in town.

Namely Paeroa, home of NZ’s favorite soft drink. L&P is, according to its own label, “World Famous in New Zealand.” Paeroa is a lovely little town that time seems to have passed by. Old-timey burger joints and hand-painted signs are the order of the day. Not exactly what you’d call a den of thieves, but several people warned me to keep a sharp eye out. Opportunists are everywhere, even quaint Paeroa.

But I had biked a long way that day and the next campsite was another fifteen or twenty kilometers away. When someone told me there was camping behind the grocery store, that was all I needed to hear.

So I laid Booster down next to my tent, ran a guyline through her back tire (essentially staking my tent to her), and tried to quiet all those fear culture instincts whispering in my head. As a last minute security measure I set my pot and pan in her spokes, because I am a genius and that will totally help.

Setting them down triggered the motion detector, which is no way to try to fall asleep. Also, if any bike thieves didn’t know where Booster was, they sure knew now.

I awoke to find I still had her rear tire in my possession.

#TBT: Mad Max Feary Ride

The first in what I hope becomes a series of Throwback Thursday posts where I can comment on events of this odyssey that I didn't have the time or the tech to post anything when they actually happened. This whole blog is a week behind on average, but some of these TBT stories go back much further than that. Today's is two months old.

So without further ado...

#

At first it sounds like the wind. A strong yet distant wind, welling up far behind you. But thrumming underneath it there's this deep, rumbling basso growl. If you've never heard it before you'll never identify it, and if you have heard it before, you'll never forget it. It's closer now and gaining fast, growling louder and louder. You look over your shoulder, certain it's close enough to see. You need to know how close it is because you need to know when to get the hell off the road. It's when you don't see it that you realize it's much farther than you thought, much louder than you thought, much, much bigger.

Then you see the dust. The monster pushes a wall of wind as it roars along, and when you finally see its headlights, it's as if a dust storm glares at you with unblinking yellow eyes. You still can't see the monster itself, but every Tasmanian you've spoken to has warned you about it. It's a logging truck, and they were right to worry about you. 

A single tire of this truck is four feet tall. It has fifty of them. Each tree trunk it carries weighs more than an SUV. It hauls not one trailer but two, and because it has two, there's no point in swerving to avoid you and your bicycle. Jackknifing the truck will kill you as surely as a head-on collision. 

These trucks are wider than a highway lane. Logging roads are spaghetti-thin by comparison, just wide enough for the trucks to be able to turn. The drivers know better than to jam on the brakes when they see you; these trucks are straight out of Mad Max, and they don't exactly stop on a dime. So they won't brake, they won't dodge, they just barrel on. The rest of us can only get out of the way.

If you've been biking all day you've got a nice surface coat of sweat going, which means the stormfront leading the truck will spray-paint you with dust. After the truck passes, it still takes about half a minute for the dust storm to die down--plenty of time for a nice, even coat over your entire body. Did you close the cap on your water bottle? If not, that'll have a new flavor and texture for you.

I can't tell you how much I wish I had video of one of these things passing me on a dusty road. It really does look like Mad Max. But I didn't dare stand close enough to film it. I had half a mind to cover Booster in sharp, rusty spikes, just to flatten one of those tires if it ever flattened me. 

BooOOOOOcycle Camping

Since it’s Halloween I figured I’d post something about what it’s like to sleep in a grave. It has a ghost in it, kinda.

I am camping in a grave tonight, kinda. My tent measures 32 by 85 inches, almost exactly the standard size of a grave. At its highest point it’s 42 inches tall, just shy of regulation grave depth. (Turns out we go four feet under, not six.) So I don’t sleep in a grave, but I do sleep in a roughly grave-sized asymmetrical dome, and it has taught me some things.

First, this is one hilly country. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve found a 32-by-85-inch patch of ground that’s actually level. Most nights I have to choose which incline I want to sleep on.

Second, it’s spooky how easy it is to lose things in so small a space. Everything in the tent is within arm’s reach, yet somehow losing things is inevitable. You take out your toothbrush, you set it down, you grab your toothpaste, and the toothbrush is gone.

Now, no braggies but I’m better at losing things than anybody I know. I once dropped my car keys, heard them hit right next to my foot, and in the half-second it took me to look down they had vanished. (A freakish ricochet: I eventually found them under a backpack several feet away.) If only there were a way to use this super power to fight crime.

But even by my standards, losing something inches away from you, something that cannot possibly have escaped your zipped-up little world, something you should be able to keep track of because dammit you only have like ten things in here… it’s maddening.

Compounding that frustration is the fact that you need this lost thing. All the non-essentials have already been pared away.  Except, okay, I’ll grant you the ukulele doesn’t qualify as essential. But the uke isn’t what disappears. What disappears is your medicine, your battery charger, that banana you were going to have as your midnight snack. You got it out specifically because you needed it and now it’s gone.

Here’s why: a tent is full of slippery surfaces—think sleeping bag, bedroll, puffy coat—and your headlamp casts shadows at weird angles. Sitting cross-legged, anything you set next to you is in a blind spot because of the way the shadows fall. And anything you set in your lap slides all too easily into a blind spot.

The guy who helped me solve this problem was Confucius. He placed great importance on rituals, and I have taken to handling my possessions with Confucian ritualism. When you set anything down, it’s at arm’s length. (Different colored surface too, if you can.) Glasses and headlamp always go in the little gear pouch next to the door, and nothing else goes in there. Never set down an uncapped pen or an unfolded knife. (Pointy things kill bedrolls, tent walls, etc.) Make tea first, then soup, then dinner. (Progressively stronger flavors. Otherwise your tea tastes like dinner.) And so on.

Ritualistic care extends beyond the tent too. Tent stakes go in the ground or in their bag, that’s it. (Little known fact: like the common house cat, tent stakes are only one generation removed from their feral state. Given the opportunity, they will run and hide.) Pack dry bags with hard stuff on the top or the bottom. (A soft waist makes it easier to strap down.) Never cook in an enclosed area (carbon monoxide) but since you are absolutely going to cook in an enclosed area (every climber I know does it) be right next your stove, ready to kill the flame the instant you feel groggy.

This isn’t advice, it’s a ritual. (If it were advice, it would be dangerous. You should definitely open your rainfly if you’re going to cook in your tent, no matter what the weather is doing.) Confucius suggests developing your own rituals, depending on what problems you’re trying to avoid—or, better, what kind of success you’re trying to set yourself up for. You know that scene in gangster movies where the FBI comes in and tosses the whole house looking for evidence? I got sick of doing that in my own tent. Much easier to get to sleep now that I have my ritual.

So there you have it: a Confucian camper is a happy camper. The spirit of Confucius coming to me in my grave-sized tent isn’t the scariest ghost story out there, but it’s all I’ve got. No scary stories like I had in Tassie, because the biking here is going unbelievably well. I rode 83 km today, shattering my previous record. Today also took me past the 500 km mark, a major accomplishment for Yours Truly. I’m bummed about not having a Halloween party to go to but happy to have another night in a hot spring, this time in Pukorokoro. Three nights in a row! I could get used to this.

Rest Day Part II: It’s Something, Mate

Parakai, and all is well. I am chilling in the hottest hot tub I could find, spending the day writing because my Advanced Alien Technology, aka iPhone, is waterproof.

My en suite mineral hot spring bath last night was… well, not what you’re picturing. The hotel does sit on a spring, because hot, mineral-scented water did come out of the tap. But the tub it filled was a big black plastic industrial number, the kind Walter White would dissolve a body in. The room itself was about 18” wider than the twin mattress it contained, and honestly the proprietor was a little embarrassed to show it to me. It’s called the trucker room. It has no shower, no mirror, and you walk through someone else’s hallway to get to it. In yesterday’s case, the someone elses were in their much nicer mineral spa, which I couldn’t help noticing because they’d left their door open. I also couldn’t help noticing they were fucking.

But hey, when you roll into a busy spa resort town on a Friday afternoon without a reservation—or indeed planning of any kind—then the trucker room is what you get.

I didn’t care. Gimme a hot tub and life is good. Plus, within easy limping distance is one of the weirdest restaurants I’ve ever been to: a pizzeria that serves Indian food, one Thai dish, and all three mixed together.

So here I am with my tikka paneer pizza, feeling no pain. Still thinking about yesterday’s fear culture versus care culture stuff, though. It’s not as if the US is only the former and NZ is only the latter. The difference is emphasis and undercurrent. But even when it’s subtle, the difference explains a lot.

For example, this morning I was chilling in a pool with three women, a kiwi couple and a single woman from San Francisco. We’re talking home repairs, and the American mentions casually that when she has a handyman at her condo, she always makes sure to stand between him and the door. The kiwis are baffled. They ask why. She says, “Because I live alone.”

I’m going to guess any American who reads this doesn’t need to ask the kiwis’ question. I was surprised the question was even asked, and doubly surprised when the kiwis had follow-up questions. I felt we already had a full explanation. But it’s not. The “because” of “because I live alone“ does no work in that sentence. It’s only an indicator of our fear culture.

Here’s a full explanation with the unstated assumptions spelled out: “Women are attacked so frequently where I live that my default response whenever I’m alone with a stranger is suspicion and self-preservation. I need to be able to run for the door, because otherwise I worry I’d be lying there for days before anyone found my body.”

This is some seriously depressing shit, and this travelogue is supposed to be lighthearted, so that’s all I’ll say on the matter. It’s not a problem I have any solution to, anyway. The best I can do is encourage fear culture people to spend some serious time abroad, soaking in a new kind of background radiation. Truly relaxing, letting your guard down for once, feels better than any hot tub.

Though while we’re on the subject, may I propose one more modification to the general background radiation? If we can still hold a society together despite our deep divisions over Hawaiian pizza, then we are ready for tikka paneer pizza coast to coast. Seriously. This is damn good, y’all.

Rest Day Part I: It’s Nothing, Mate

Well, I got my rest day. One and a half, really. Plus I got to hitchhike! When’s the last time you got to do that?

I flew too close to the sun. Too many days in a row setting new personal records for distance. Two days ago, 69 kilometers. Yesterday, 72. Today, I awoke to grumbles of complaint from my left hip. (Uh oh. That’s the good one.) But I figure maybe it’s just because I slept funny. All my camping buddies will rejoice at this: my bedroll has developed a leak. They all this thing. It sounds like I’m sleeping in a giant pile of empty Doritos bags. Anyway, my patch kit has been unequal to the task of fixing the pinhole puncture in it, so once or twice a night I wake up sleeping on the ground and have to re-inflate it. Maybe that’s what set off my hip, right? Maybe a little biking will warm it up and calm it down.

Fifteen kilometers in, the hip seems mollified but my right knee says no more hills. No problem. As slow as I am biking uphill, hike-a-bike isn’t much less efficient. Just more time to spend with the cows, who, no matter how I’m making my way up all these hills, give me the same doubtful looks about which one of us is the intelligent species.

Twenty kilometers in, the right knee says yeah, no walking either. Both hips chime in shouting “hear hear.” The next two days were supposed to be restful, forty K’s or so, but it’s clear I’m going no further.

Enter the care culture of the kiwis. A quick google search shows me a nearby Airbnb. They even have a hot tub, which is what I need most in this world. I call, she wonders how I got this number because they close the business years ago. But then she says, “My husband uses that room as an office now. I’ll ask him if he can move. May I call you back in five minutes?”

Of course she’ll ask, because New Zealand. And of course he’ll say yes, because New Zealand. But just in case—and to not inconvenience them—I keep sticking my thumb out.

Not two minutes later, a big dude in a giant pickup truck towing an even gianter trailer sees me and Booster sitting on the side of the road. “What happened, mate?” I give him the short version. “Where you headed?” Anywhere I can find a hot bath, I tell him. “Oh, you want Parakai, mate. Nowhere better.”

He’s right. Parakai is hot spring heaven. Two resorts, and one hotel boasts a mineral bath in every room. The town even sits right on the TA. It’s another thirty kilometers, and this dude just came from there. But as it turns out, he’s just unloaded a bunch of topsoil, so his big-ass trailer is conveniently empty, and after a busy morning landscaping he’s knocking off work early. “Throw your bike in the back, mate.” I said let me buy you lunch. “Nah, mate. It’s nothing.” Your gas, then. “Nah, mate. It’s a company truck.” A beer, then. Something cold to drink. “Nah, mate. It’s nothing.” So is buying you lunch. “Nah, mate. No worries.”

He says this is just what kiwis do because they want visitors to know they’ll always be welcome here. Exactly the opposite, I fear, of modern American culture. But so many things are polar opposites here. In another post I’ll have to say something more about this, but one of the great unseen tragedies of covid is that a years’ worth of American study abroad students were suddenly called home without ever getting to really absorb what it’s like to live without fear all the time, and the following year all those opportunities were closed to our students again.

I don’t think most Americans think of themselves as living in fear every day, but that’s because it’s background radiation to us. We don’t think of the increasingly obsequious and apologetic scripts for customer service representatives as symptoms of fear culture, but they are. Ditto the “drink responsibly” in small print on the beer can, the “remove child before folding” label on the collapsible stroller, the word FREEDOM on T-shirts and ball caps and bumper stickers. Kiwis and Australians have more freedoms than Americans have, but none of the T-shirts. Why? They’re not afraid. The conspiracy theories so many of us buy into haven’t taken hold here.

I wish more Americans could spend a few months in a place like this, where the only injuries a foreign bicyclist has to worry about are the self-inflicted variety. 95% of drivers give me a wide berth. Those who come close, other kiwis find obnoxious. No one texts and drives here. No one. Believe me, I’m on the lookout for it. But of course that’s my fear culture talking. Meanwhile, their care culture says hey, we’re not going to expose each other to that kind of avoidable harm.

And look, I know not everyone gets the kind of treatment I’ve enjoyed. I’m no expert on kiwi culture, but I’ve learned enough to know if I were a big Māori dude, there are plenty of pakeha drivers who would keep on driving. The more tattoos, the more drivers speed up. If I were a single woman, add a whole different set of problems. I get that. But those problems exist in a fear culture too, and fear makes them worse.

The end of the story is the Airbnb host texts me back and asks if I can get there on my own or I’d like her to pick me up. I tell here I managed to catch a ride south, she says no worries, I hope your knee comes right soon. Then the landscaper drops me and Booster in hot spring heaven and just will not accept a few bucks for lunch or even a cold drink. He told me if I really want to pay him back, tell my friends this story. So here’s me, paying him back.

The Road Goes Ever On And On

I keep biking down the road, leaving past photos further and further behind. So to catch up at least a little bit, instead of telling you about Hobbiton I’ll just show you. Super nerdy, super touristy, loved every minute of it.

The painstaking, loving attention to detail is just above and beyond. They left Bilbo’s pipe and book on the garden bench in Bag End. And at Sam Gamgee’s house, his kids haven’t put away their toys.

Peter Jackson is so obsessive over the details that it wasn’t enough for him to have the hobbits hang their clothes out to dry. For days before filming, he’d have crew members walk back and forth from the hobbit holes to the clotheslines so there would be a barely visible worn track in the grass.

More obsession with detail: the Green Dragon is old and weathered to the point that you can barely make out the green of its dragon, while the lamppost out front is something you’d only ever notice by accident. (I got bonus points from the tour guide for spotting it.)

I have only one complaint about the entire experience, and that is the photo opportunity with Gandalf. It was a life-size statue, the same as I found in the Wellington visitor information office. Wrong wrong wrong. Obviously it needs to be eight or nine feet tall, whatever height is necessary so I look like a hobbit standing next to him.

Weta Workshop, you don’t even need to pay me royalties for the idea. Just build the right Gandalf and then fly me back so I can get my picture with him.

The Time Of My Life

Two posts ago I said I didn’t think I would finish the TA. I wasn’t lying when I told you to bet against me, but over the next few posts I’m going to tell you how I hope to beat the odds.

Technique #2: Buy Buddhism. I’m not a religious person, but when you’re drowning you can’t be too choosy  about life preservers. So please forgive a brief philosophical foray into Buddhist metaphysics. I will include pretty pictures so you don’t get bored.

The TL;DR version is this: the past and the future aren’t real. The only thing that’s real is the now.

To say past and future aren’t real sounds controversial, but I bet you already believe it. They definitely aren’t real in the way the present is real. The future is what might happen, maybe even what will happen, but that means it ain’t real, it’s imaginary. (Which isn’t to say it’s unimportant. Santa is imaginary and he drives the entire US economy.)

The past isn’t real either, even though we see its effects in the present. The photos I post here were taken in a remembered past, but they’re seen in the present. Even remembering the past when I took them doesn’t make the past real. It used to be real. Now it’s memory, which only ever happens in the present.

I’m only skimming the surface here, and we could go a lot deeper with all of this stuff, but for now the only thing I need to beat the 9:1 odds I laid against myself two posts ago is to get rid of my self. Past Me wrote a TA itinerary for Future Me to ride, and neither of those guys exist. Not in the way Present Me exists. Present Me has memory and imagination, and that’s all Past Me and Future Me really are.

The upshot is when I said I can’t finish that original, fantastical itinerary, I’m not lying. The me who typed that didn’t have the strength or endurance to finish that ride. Neither does the Present Me typing this right now. This me is getting his ass kicked by 60 km rides, and that itinerary includes days of 80-plus. But he’s a bit stronger. He has reason to imagine a Future Me who’s capable of a lot more than Present Me can do.

The best that Present Me can manage is to get his ass kicked every day and keep getting back on the saddle. Prior to coming down here, I had never biked more than 50 km in my life. On Saturday I biked 60. On Sunday, 63. Monday, 55, of which 30 of it was uphill and into a relentless headwind. Tuesday was originally scheduled (by Past Me) as a rest day, lounging around in this gorgeous kauri forest. Present Me’s idea of a rest day is very different. He expects a restful Tuesday because the ride is “only” 52 km, almost all of it downhill.

As I’ve said before, these are laughably short distances by bikepacking standards. But the Buddha would have me judge myself only by the standards of Present Me. According to those standards, success is Future Me getting into camp early enough on Tuesday to do laundry. Because this long-sleeve shirt, which Past Me has been wearing every day to avoid sunburn, is now crusty with sweat-salt. Present Me doesn’t care about mileage goals. He just wants Future Me to find a damn washing machine.

But the kauri forest is certainly worth taking a rest day for, and Future Me may decide to stay and just give his nasty-ass shirt a good rinse in the river. (Present Me got us a sweet campsite right on the water.) The most famous tree here is Tane Mahuta, New Zealand’s largest living kauri. At 2,000 years old, it’s almost a contemporary of the Buddha’s famous Bodhi Tree. Tane Mahuta is the symbol of Tane, lord of the forests and protector of all life. Cameras can’t do it justice. This tree is 167 feet tall and 45 feet around. I’d call it breathtaking, but it’s breath-giving, isn’t it? Given its sheer volume, I must have inhaled some of the oxygen it exhaled, and that’s a cool thought.

Someday I hope to do the same in India, at the Bodhi Tree. Until then I’ll just take the Buddha’s advice and keep having the time of my life. Which is only this one time, the present time, where there are no itineraries. Future Me can deal with those. I’ll just try to be present.

And He’s Off!

In my last post I said I didn’t think I would finish. I wasn’t lying when I told you to bet against me, but over the next few posts I’m going to tell you how I hope to finish this thing anyway.

Technique #1: Cheat. Yesterday I took the bus up north, and it reached the Cape Reinga lighthouse much earlier than I expected. So I decided to cheat my original, fantastical itinerary. I started one day early, since I met my mileage goals for yesterday and today, I am still ahead of the game.

Cape Reinga offers a breathtaking view of the Pacific Ocean, which makes it an appropriate place for a farewell. It is as close as you can get to the afterlife. So says Māori tradition, anyhow: when they die, no matter where they are in the world, they come up Ninety Mile Beach to the northernmost point of the North Island, and thence to the great beyond.

From the Reinga lighthouse I hit 58 kph down the winding hills of Highway 1. Then my speed plunged to about 8 kph riding straight down Te Paki Stream. The stream was high enough to wash out any trace of a bike path, so for three miles or so Booster got to play kayak.

From there I began the ninety-kilometer beach that is Ninety Mile Beach. Don’t ask. If you time it right between high tides, the sand is almost as firm as concrete. If you can find the hardpack. Under normal circumstances it’s not hard to find, because the instant you leave it your tires bog down and your life suddenly sucks. But on the hardpack, your only worries are wind and sunburn.

That’s normal circumstances. This morning wasn’t normal. I camped at the Bluff, a gorgeous dune-bound site with wild horses, roaring surf, and excellent stargazing. Last night the stargazing got cut short by rain, and the rain never stopped. So this morning—uh oh—the whole beach was soft and wet. Without the hardpack, that ride is murder.

But there’s a solution: drop your tire pressure to 10 psi or even less. You’re going to be slow but at least you have enough surface area to float over the sand. So that’s what I did, for a solid 20 km.

Today the mileage goal was 60 km, which is the farthest I’ve ever biked in my life (racking up Worst Bikepacker points for doing virtually no training this summer). My big worry was that I’d have to bike 120. As the sun cooked off the rain, the hardpack came back as a sine wave following the surf. So if this beach is 60 km as the crow flies, the wave following the straight line would be at least double that.

But the guys who wrote my guidebook are damn good. They took the sine wave into account! Their directions were spot on. So thank you, Kennett brothers, for paying attention. About four hours in, the hardpack was fully restored and the merciless crosswind that had been battering me from my ten o’clock shifted to nine and then to eight. Hardpack plus tailwind equals Happy Steve. The last hour was easier than the first hour—exactly the opposite of yesterday.

So I’m a cheater. I’m going to cheat further by canceling every rest day in the original itinerary. Rest days will appear on their own, be it an injury, broken equipment, cave trolls, or whatever else New Zealand throws at me. For now I’m a day ahead of schedule. We’ll see how long I can keep it that way.

One more thing: riding on the beach, I got up close and personal with the most dangerous animal in New Zealand. Predictably, it’s not really from here; it drifts to benevolent NZ from maleficent Australia.

The blue bottle jellyfish is as long as my finger and has enough venom to kill a roomful of people. I’m not making that up. Good thing for me I had to bike in a stream, not the ocean. But these little fellas pepper the beach, along with their bigger, purplier, not-so-deadly-but-still-damn-painful cousins, the Portuguese man-o’-war. I didn’t dare run them over, because I don’t know how long jellyfish venom stays on tires.

B x 3

I’m on the bus to Paihia, the first leg of a two-day ride to Cape Reinga. At the crack of dawn on Sunday I begin the Tour Aotearoa. That’s the plan, anyway. As you might guess, it’s been on my mind a lot, and my thoughts keep looping back to three people: Bayes, Buress, and Bein.

Don Bein was my grandfather. I could write volumes about him, but for present purposes I’ll just describe him as an irrepressible optimist who often said—and firmly believed—“if you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.“

Hannibal Buress is one of my favorite comedians. He says he doesn’t use a napkin at restaurants, and when people ask him why he doesn’t use a napkin, he says “because I believe in myself.”

(Here’s a clip of Buress including the napkin bit. Tragically, the YouTubes have nothing from Don Bein. Believe me, the world is poorer for it.)

Thomas Bayes gives us Bayesian reasoning, which says you should form your beliefs based on evidence, and when new evidence presents itself you should reevaluate your beliefs. For example, if you’ve never met me before and I tell you I’m going to attempt to bike the Tour Aotearoa, you might estimate my chance of success at 50/50. You have no more evidence to go on than you’ve got on a coin flip. Then, with each passing blog entry from my Tasmanian Trail follies, you’d lower your confidence in the belief accordingly.

I’m thinking about these three B’s as I read the wildly optimistic itinerary I sketched out for myself almost a year ago, when the TA started shifting from flight of fancy to hey, maybe I should give this a shot. I never promised anyone I was going to finish this thing. I only said I would attempt it. But the daily mileage goals in that early itinerary exceed every day of the Tasmanian Trail. By a lot. My shortest day on the TA is 20% longer than my longest day on the TT.

And yes, I had some pretty serious growing pains on the TT. And yes, I’ve learned from them. (Though the TA is certain to deliver more.) I made mistakes there that could have been disastrous and weren’t, and I won’t make those again. But I will make new mistakes, at least that bad and maybe worse, because that’s just how life is (or at least how mine is).

Don Bein says if I don’t believe in myself, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Buress says believe in yourself when what’s at stake is elementary and the consequences of failure are trivial. (At least that’s the moral I see in a thirty-second bit he never intended a philosopher to scrutinize.) Bayes says believe in yourself until the evidence says you shouldn’t.

I am a Bein but also a Bayesian. The evidence says I cannot complete this ride by the end of the year, and I find that evidence convincing. But I also believe that conviction is too heavy to add to an already overloaded bike. She has no room for it. Neither should I.

Enter Buress. The consequences of napkinless dining are trivial. In bikepacking I’ve already flirted with not-so-trivial consequences, and I have to keep reminding myself New Zealand poses greater risks than Tasmania. It’s much bigger, with shockingly few people to get to you if you need help. But objectively speaking, biking to work is far more hazardous than cruising around the countryside where no drivers can hit you.

The fact is, Bein, Bayes, and Buress all have it right. I don’t believe I can do this, but that belief can’t sink me because it’s a probability, not a heartfelt conviction, and in any case the consequences of failure aren’t much higher than napkinless eating. The whole point of coming down here was to attempt something beyond my ability.

So the conclusion I reach is this: I’m going to attempt the ride anyway, but if you had a hundred bucks to bet on whether I finish, bet $90 against me. Maybe there will be tailwinds instead of headwinds. Maybe the navigation problems are behind me. Bayes will caution you against claiming 100% certainty, but 90% isn’t out of reach. That’s where I’m at.

But I’m going into the arena anyway, to dare greatly. Worst Bikepacker in New Zealand award, meet your next contender.