WEEK SEVEN
This week, I’ve got the time it takes me from gaining consciousness to leaving camp after making breakfast and tea/coffee in 45 minutes.
I’ve eaten a famous pie. I’ve had three weird cases of being in the same place as people I’ve met previously on the journey.
My Wahoo gave up on me and then I gave up on myself after I realised I’d left my drone SD card in a campsite all in the same day. I did some admin in Christchurch. I felt simultaneously excited and nervous to cross Molesworth Station.
Monday forced me to reflect back to week one when I bumped into a girl I’d chatted to in a hostel in Whanganui. She was so excited to hear about how many miles I’d covered since we last spoke and which were my favourite parts. We laughed about how our last conversation felt like years ago.
Monday was also the second day of a mentally draining headwind. I’d aimed to be in Tekapo on Sunday night and arrived on Monday at lunchtime, having cut the ride in two because of the sheer amount of mental energy it took to keep fighting the wind.
The ride itself, I could still mostly appreciate, was incredibly beautiful. However keen I was to get it over with, I made myself stop every now and again to just stand and stare at the mountains— my happy place. I was, however, not keen to stop much when cycling along the Tekapo Canal, a turquoise water system that smelt strongly of salmon.
When I eventually arrived, I wandered into a cafe and the only space was next to a girl in hiking gear, looking as unwashed and beaten down as I did. Unclean people are like magnets.
We chatted for over an hour about her walk down the country and my ride. As usual, I took a lot of inspiration from her journey and felt a step closer to the PCT dream. She told me about how she’d wanted to ride across Europe with her partner and how she felt a step closer to doing that after our conversation.
I extended my stay in the hostel in Tekapo on Monday night to stay on Tuesday too. I wasn’t ready to get back on the bike after Sunday and Monday’s battles and needed a day to recharge my mental batteries. I preferred this plan because I got to test my ‘Do I feel better resting in smaller places over big towns/cities?’.
Answer: yeah, this time I felt much better. Got to test it three times though right?
I feel a little weak on the days I wake up and don’t feel like riding, but this week is the week I’ve truly realised/accepted that this trip is more of a mental battle than a physical one. Just as I need calories to keep my legs turning, I need purposeful ‘sitting and doing nothing but staring at nice views’ to keep my motivation ticking.
Once on the bike, after the first couple of pedal strokes, more often than not, I’m immediately back to loving it. But there’s something in my brain that I’m becoming more aware of, that freaks out a bit when I wake up. I tried to reflect on whether this happened when I was camping with Sara and Kirsten, and I don’t think it did, or it can’t have been as intense if I can’t remember it.
A coping mechanism of mine is analysing why I am feeling the way I am feeling; I like to know why.
I sat in Tekapo on Monday and tried to figure out why I’d started to have this anxiety in the mornings.
Is it subconscious and biological- am I not giving myself enough energy/ sleeping enough so my brain is going into protective mode? Am I putting too much pressure on the final destination- could I be more patient? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just a phase, maybe it’s come on because I’ve given myself a date to cross over to the North Island so things feel fixed for the first time.
I woke up on Wednesday to my alarm, took my earplugs out, heard the rain splatter off the guttering outside and put my earplugs back in.
Once I’d gone through another sleep cycle, I woke up and the rain had mostly subsided but for it being 0745, it was intensely dark, because of the cloud layer. I wasn’t keen on a dark, grey day.
In the false-hope-of-a-day-of-sleep-delirium I was in having fallen asleep again, I lost the key to my room and spent a while ruffling through my things looking for it. I got flustered and frustrated at myself, facing a charge.
After eventually letting go of any hope of finding it following a reshuffle of things in my panniers, I forced myself to slow down and re-centre by getting coffee and having a sit-down and a breathe before I left.
I’d calmed down a bit and felt ready to move.
I was joining the Sound to Sound route and would be riding it until Picton before I crossed back onto the North Island. The ride out of Tekapo was incredible. I rode through a basin surrounded by snow-capped mountains on my right and rolling hills on my left. The sun burnt out the dark cloud layer after an hour or so, and everything felt too good to be true.
Everywhere I turned I was greeted with miles of flat partitioned by grand grey and blue jagged ridges in the distance. I was consumed by the landscape and didn’t want to stop cycling through it. I drooled at the thought of riding through the remote and wild mountains in South America. I was in my element and very content.
I’d exhausted my Diary of a CEO phase, so I was looking for something in a different realm to listen to. On Wednesday, I stuck on a seven-part series produced by the ‘The Rest is History’ podcast on the rise of Hitler. I spent about five hours listening to that before I got sick of listening to the same people talk, and had to stick on some music.
n.b. I’d definitely recommend the podcast, it is always super interesting and informative BUT I think listening to the same people for five hours straight is probably a bit much in any circumstance.
60 beautiful kilometres in, I came to a paved road and saw a sign that said ‘10 km, Farlie.’ I recognised the name but wasn’t sure why. After a quick check on Google Maps, I realised I’d been recommended a visit to Fairlie Bakehouse, for one of their famous pies.
I couldn’t be that close and not go, so I ended the route that was taking me in the opposite direction and followed my nose towards the smell of pastry.
I was pretty happy with my decision after a mouthful of steak and cheese and buttery pastry hit my stomach. Delicious.
I laughed mentally to myself when the British man at the table next to me exclaimed to his friend ‘Now that is not the best pie in the world is it’. I don’t think they claim to be the best pies in the world.
The cynical nature of the Brit has become a bit of a distant memory, having been surrounded by happy, ever grateful Kiwis for nearly two months now.
I had a look at how to get to my final destination on Komoot, which is fast becoming my favourite navigation app, and saw the bakery detour added no distance onto the day if I took the road to Geraldine.
In hindsight, I should’ve gone the ten kilometres back to where I came off route. The traffic was the worst I’ve faced so far, giving me no room when passing.
It was beginning to overwhelm me and I stuck as far left as I physically could and put my other headphone in to try to dampen the sound of camper vans coming way too close.
It was also, to continue with the theme of the week, really windy. It was hard to predict where the wind rush would force my bike when big trucks came past, I’d be shuffled out towards the road and out of the shoulder and have to vigorously steer myself back in before the next came roaring past.
Often, they sort of suck you in with them and it’s fun to see your speed increase by a couple of kilometres an hour. It’s equally scary to realise the impact they can have when you move laterally across the road with little control.
I’d arrived in Geraldine quite early, feeling weirdly tired. I had planned to continue a few extra kilometres up the road to make Thursday’s ride a little shorter, but I didn’t have the capacity to plan food for the evening and into the next day as there was going to be a lack of shops and cafes, so ended my ride and headed to the campsite there.
Coming out of camp reception having successfully secured myself a site, a man jumped out of his camper van and exclaimed “I saw you in Karitane!”.
“Ah!” I replied.
I had no idea where Karitane was.
It transpired that Karitane was the early cafe stop I’d had on the day out of Dunedin, and this man had been sitting opposite me at said cafe.
After I filled him in on which route I’d taken to get to where we met again and got my daily dose of validation, he drove off in his warm van and I was left to set my tent up as fast as I could to not get the inner wet, shivering.
Most of the campsites in New Zealand have showers that are limited to six minutes for environmental reasons.
Sometimes, the water turns off after six minutes. Sometimes, the hot water turns off and you’re shocked with freezing water as you fight to turn it off as quickly as you can.
I was so cold that afternoon, I jumped from one shower to the next and back three times to try and warm my core up a bit. Then I put on all my thermals and sat in the camp kitchen with my hat on and my hood up as people walked around in one layer and I wondered why I couldn’t warm up.
I filled myself up with some delicious Turkish food and fell asleep before nine pm, in all my layers, hoping Thursday’s ride wouldn’t be me vs. 188 kilometres of headwind.
How naive.
I don’t want to write much about Thursday and I have very few photos of Thursday because Thursday was the day I fell out with myself.
On Thursday, after about 60 kilometres of my depleting patience vs. augmenting headwind, my Wahoo decided to turn off and not turn back on.
This was problematic because the Sound to Sound route does not take the most direct route into Christchurch and I learnt if I locked my phone, Komoot would remove the loaded route and I didn’t always have 4G to reload it.
Add navigation problems to a persistent headwind and thick grey cloud, you get a pretty stressful ride.
Thursday tested my patience. When my Wahoo turned off, I stopped on the side of the road and tried to gain some perspective.
‘It is not the end of the world.’ I told myself.
But it felt close to it in the moment.
I crawled the remaining grey, flat and windy 128 kilometres into Christchurch and arrived in a pretty bleak head space.
Things got a little easier when I arrived at the hostel and had a warm shower.
I’d been ‘upgraded’ to a two-person dorm, to which I initially thought: “That is a downgrade”, in fear the other person was uncomfortable (had this experience in Dunedin) and/or snored (the more offensive of the two options).
I showered, was thrilled when I saw the closest cheap food I could find was Mexican (my favourite), ate a huge burrito and went back to my hostel to find no one had moved into the other bed. Result! Private room for cheap!
Sorting a few bits out before bed, an intrusive thought reared its head and I realised I couldn’t remember putting the SD card back in my drone the night before, when, for some reason I can’t explain, I took it out when I was trying to warm up in the kitchen.
A quick check later, sure enough, I’d left it 188 kilometres back. No way was I going back for it.
Sleep came easy that night, as it does most nights. I didn’t wake up until 0930, unusual considering my body clock has become religiously set to a 0530 wake-up. (My alarm is never this early so I don’t know why this is happening).
I wandered out into the streets of Christchurch, met with the unfamiliar and welcome sight of blue sky.
I no longer felt as frustrated at myself as I did the night before. Forgetting things is bound to happen on trips like this when you’re tired; it’s just one of those things. I headed to a cafe in a boat shed and was presented with a ‘medium coffee’ which was basically a bucket and then proceeded to get my daily fix of green in the Botanical Gardens. Peaceful bliss.
Coming back to the hostel, I checked on my bike and saw it had fallen over in the wind. I picked it back up and ran the cranks to see if everything was moving smoothly.
My back wheel was rotating about twice before stopping. Hmm. Thankfully, the least offensive problem on a long list of possibilities had occurred, the brake pads had closed against the rotor. I’m constantly playing a game of Russian roulette with my lack of spare hanger.
A quick look on Google presented one bike shop in a decent radius that was open on this Good Friday.
I gave them a call and asked if I could come in and quickly use his brake-pad-stretcher tool (?). Ten minutes later he opened the door to his workshop, where he’d laid out the tools I needed, and went back to what he was doing after telling me to “have fun”.
I got to use a cool electronic bike stand and I found it funny he just left me alone with all of these expensive tools with no supervision. I’m not sure this would ever ‘be allowed’ in the UK.
Making my other fix of greens, Ali walked into the kitchen.
We sort of looked at each other with a ‘is that..?’ expression before laughing about how weirdly small the travel bubble is in New Zealand.
Ali, who I’d last seen for breakfast in Queenstown, had finished her cycle tour of New Zealand in Bluff and had been hitchhiking since.
Gratefully, considering the theme of the week, she spoke about how she’d taken days off when the weather was crap because it made her feel rubbish. I realised I could do that too.
Saturday came around and was gearing myself up for the last three days/ 400 kilometres of the South Island.
As a last-ditch attempt to get my Wahoo revived, I’d put it on top of a cupboard in a warm laundry room. I tentatively tried to turn it on just before I left, and to my unexpected, gleeful surprise, the screen flashed on.
This set me up for a great day. I’d portioned a percentage of mental energy to getting my phone out at junctions to check I was going the right way.
I had all this spare energy reclaimed and it resulted in the wildly unqualified impression that I could tackle anything the day could throw at me.
Justifying some of the feeling, it was the only day that week I didn’t mind when adverse weather came out to play.
It rained for about five out of eight and a half hours of riding that day and didn’t dampen (… ha ha?) my spirits all that much.
I spent the day following a ghost’s tyre marks down the gravel roads; wondering what type of cyclist was ahead of me.
One who struggled up hills somehow more than me I realised, seeing his journey zigzagged up to the crest of the climbs mapped out.
I’d eventually reached the top of the last climb of the day after three and a half hours of gravelly goodness and saw a farmer fixing a hole in his fence.
He asked where I was off to and told me there was a man just a couple of minutes ahead, I’d caught up to my carrot!
Sure enough, I swung a right at a junction and there he was cruising left and right. I pedalled on and slowed by his side, we had a brief chat about the rain, the climbing, and where we were ending our rides. I left him shortly after, in search of food. I was starving.
A couple of relatively uneventful hours later, I arrived in Hanmer Springs (NOT Hammer Springs, as I’d been telling people). A wet, dark evening was fast closing in.
Racing to get my tent up and my damp kit off, I was stopped to talk about my ride by a fellow Brit who offered crisps and guacamole, alongside an array of recommendations for my upcoming days off in Wellington.
I threw myself into a disappointingly lukewarm shower, scrambled to get my thermals on, inhaled some half-warmed-up pasta, (side activity: prayed I hadn’t given myself an upset stomach from my impatience) and then finally wriggled myself into my sack for a night of deep sleep.
Onto the Molesworth Muster…
Thanks for reading 🙂