Author: neil

For much of our southward journey on the South Island we were on the same roads as the Tour Aotearoa, the 3000km bikepacking route defined by the Kennett Brothers. It’s similar to an Adventure Cycling route in the United States: a well-mapped and well-described route that anyone can ride at any time. But it also…

We had two ways to get to Geraldine. The “short” route would be on the direct Christchurch-to-Queenstown highway (SH79) the entire time (with no bike paths alongside it like our last ride), and hillier, but 13 miles shorter. The longer route would loop us south through Cave and Pleasant Point, on potentially-quieter SH8 (since it’s…

“Neil. Wake up. I think I’m going to puke.” Not words either of us ever hope to be uttering or hearing at 12:30am inside our tent, but here we were. And unfortunately, she wasn’t wrong. I immediately unzipped her tent door as a precaution, but before I could get my wits together to find a…

Usually a 6:30am alarm gets us into the holiday park kitchen to make breakfast before most other people are even moving, but all the fellow hikers and bikers in this campsite rewrote that story. Rett had to come back to the tent to tell me to stop packing up so that we could get our…

They’re pretty organized at the Lake Ohau Lodge. I suppose they need to be in order to serve the 30+ people here with the limited staffing available at such a remote location. Last night at dinner they told us to return to the same table for breakfast, which means we got to share our meal…