Category: Bike Tour

We’ve moved to four different places over the last eight days, but thanks to two different trains, or simply short hops, we haven’t done a bike ride longer than 15 miles over those eight days. Today’s 42 miles would be nearly twice the 8-day total, and our longest distance since we descended into Christchurch three…

Day 3 Our original plan for today was to do an unloaded out-and-back ride to a big waterfall, with stops at a natural bridge and a free-access cave along the way. But our rescheduled Blackwater Rafting trip, though late in the day, is probably not late enough for us to comfortably do the ride, and…

Day 2 Today is our Waitomo Caves main event: Blackwater Rafting! That’s the clever branding invented by some nuts who, a couple decades ago, decided to start taking tourists on trips through the caves where you jump off underground waterfalls and float down a hidden river on an inner tube with a ceiling of glowworms…

Friday morning traffic on the two highways (SH3 and SH39) through Otorohanga was much busier than we had seen a couple days earlier, proving that the four-day school holiday around Easter turns it into a big travel weekend (the NZ Transport Agency even published traffic-backup predictions for the weekend like it did for the Christmas/New…

As we wheeled our bikes out to the street in the darkness, our AirBNB hosts continued their above-and-beyond by coming outside from their warm glowing house to give us more fresh-baked sweets, and a bag of pineapple chunks (and an offer to keep an eye on our bikes while we ran back to grab our…