22 Mar - 4 April Cape Reinga to Christchurch

The problem with being busy doing really great things is this blog gets a bit behind, then it becomes harder to write because I forget most of the little details! It’s been a common problem in New Zealand and continues to be that way!

So picking up from Auckland, somewhat shamefully, over a month ago I left to head up to the northernmost point of the North Island, Cape Reinga. The weather still hadn’t calmed down and the riding was cold and not as enjoyable as it should have been through another lovely part of the country, so a few days stay in Whangarei, the last decent sized town on the way north was called for.

Letting the weather pass, which it does pleasingly quickly here, on the 26^th I set off to Ahipara, a little beach village with a YHA hostel, and the perfect departure point to the long ride alongside 90 mile beach to the north point. On the way across two awesome things happened. Firstly, I passed along the first toll road in New Zealand, which happily is run automatically by cameras registering your number plate, then you go onto their internet site and pay the toll electronically. Fortunately number plates here only have six digits, and mine is seven long which boggles their computer’s mind and lets me travel toll free! It works, I called to ask about it, bonus!

Secondly, as people all say the good motorbikin’ is on the South Island, I was surprised to find the most enjoyable and downright fun road you could imagine passing over a small mountain in the middle of nowhere. Not particularly steep, but very twisty, the road engineers decided to elaborately bank a series of several hundred corners that gives you the sensation of being on a rollercoaster dipping and rising around bends for about 50kms. It’s awesome and I actually felt motion sickness at the end of it. It was even worse an hour later after I’d turned round and rode back and forth along it again just to check it was as good as it seemed the first time round.

The awesome banked road

Twisting and turning on the road north

The following day with perfect weather and bike running like a dream, I set off up to Cape Reinga. As with many parts of New Zealand, there’s only one road there and it’s the same road back. That said, apparently parts of the beach are used a highway which you can ride/drive up when the tides out. Sadly at that time, it would have meant leaving so early in the morning it wouldn’t have been worth it, so I stuck to the road which was more than perfectly pleasant.

The road to Cape Reinga

Nice scenery along the coast

Riding down a track to the dunes

Being New Zealand, they do dune surfing!

following the beach north

Almost there, above a bay looking south

Cape Reinga in comparison to Bluff down south is a delight to ride to, a long narrow spit of land stretches through green fields with huge yellow sand dunes poking up along the west coast making an odd looking scenery of rolling green hills with the odd yellow one thrown in perfectly in place. The north point is marked by a small lighthouse and the ubiquitous yellow sign pointing to various places. Notably busier than Bluff, people mill around asking each other to take photos and read all about the Maori history of the area which is known as the  place where souls travel to after the person dies.

The path to Cape Reinga lighthouse

The very north point of new Zealand

The yellow sign

Cape Reinga was another little milestone of my time in New Zealand and was soon to give way to the next and final one, my friends Allen and Kate visiting from England for a few weeks. This meant a long ride down to Christchurch that was best done in a few long days with some time off to relax on arrival. I picked a spot in New Brighton on the coast called strangely the Purple Der, a purple painted home in an area badly damaged by the earthquakes but was itself fine. The motel as such was someone’s home to which they’d added three guest rooms in an annex off one side which were both cheap and incredibly comfortable.

Catching a ferry on way south

Crossing a river on the North Island

It was a delight to stay somewhere that was within my budget but was basically my own small apartment with private bathroom, kitchen and a huge TV. The long beach at Brighton was just a few minutes away with a little town centre and library, it was the perfect place to relax for a few days before my final big ride back up to Auckland from where my bike will head home by ferry and a few days later I’ll be overtaking it on a plane.

13-21 March: Christchurch to Auckland

I was heading back to the North Island to get my bike serviced in Auckland and take a chance to ride the often recommended Forgotten World Highway and head up Cape Reinga at the top of the island, all things I’d missed in the rush to get south while the weather was good. 

 Look in any good driver’s atlas or list of best roads in New Zealand and toward the top will be Arthur’s Pass. The main and only road from Christchurch to the West Coast cuts through the Southern Alps and some of the South Islands most awesome scenery. Wonder what I was up to this day last year?

Starting across Arthur's Pass

Arthur's Pass

The road is about 150kms long and highlights the one main difference between biking in New Zealand and England. In England you’ll happily ride 100 miles to find 10 miles of good roads, here you’re never more than 10 miles away from 100 miles of awesome, lightly trafficked and well laid super twisty tarmac.

Arthur's Pass

Winding down the West Coast side of Arthur's Pass

Spending the best part of a full days riding along Arthur’s Pass with improving weather all the way led to a choice of two towns at the far end, Westport or Greymouth. On the way down, we’d stopped in Greymouth, a small industrial town with not much to shout about, so I took in the extra 100kms to Westport to find a smaller industrial town with even less to shout about. In complete contrast to Wanaka and Queenstown, two of the most beautiful little towns half way down the West Coast, these two were where the business of fishing and mining is done, but with the distances involved, everyone touring the South Island ends up staying at one or t’other.

Riding to Westport

Near Westport - a rock overhangs the road

Deciding not to hang around, it was all go to Picton for the ferry north. Stopping in a small, cheap and extremely new and clean motel on the way (a key? Well if you insist, but most people don’t use them... there’s no crime here!) The ride to Picton can be fairly plain, but the short twisty Queen Charlotte Highway is an awesome way to arrive in another funtional little town. 

Queen Charlotte Sound

Just outside Picton

I was on the early ferry to Wellington to get a good start slogging up the North Island. There’s only one main road up from Wellington for 100kms or so and it’s not the most interesting, coupled with strong winds it made for a long day in the saddle. The main break from the long trek was meeting Harry, a Brit touring the world on a vegetable oil and diesel powered Enfield Bullet, an interesting looking bike and experiment in what might be the future of bike engines, vege oil! 

Boarding the ferry as the sun rises

3 hours later exiting to Wellington

Harry and his vege-oil powered Bullet

Once you get over that hurdle though, from New Plymouth there’s another 151 kilometre road that had been recommended and recommended over and over by almost every biker I’d met, the Forgotten World Highway, something I’d somehow missed on the way south first time. Starting as a road between Stafford and Taumarunui that was never quite completed and has a stretch of gravel road in the middle amongst several ‘ghost towns’, now deserted with the decline of a railway that runs though.

True to its description, you fuel up in Stafford (there’s none along the way) and shoot through to Taumarunui which takes forever because you’re chopping up and down gears winding around hillsides and through gorges.

The Highway begins innocently enough

The road starts twisting

Through a tunnel

Typical section of road - spot the trafic!

Onto gravel

More twists and turns

Dropping down to a sort of hairpin

Highway ends, 151kms later

After camping in Taumarunui the plan was to head around Coromandel, apparently a pretty beach-y peninsula. Unfortunately the weather wasn’t playing ball at all, heavy cloud with on and off rain meant a loop around wasn’t all it could have been, so I cut it short and headed up to Auckland to wait out what was supposed to be a poor few days ahead.

True to the weatherman’s word, the heavens opened as I sloshed into Auckland, for a soaking wet few days, the lowlight of which was riding back from the garage in a torrential downpour... wet now dry later. For every lowlight though there’s two highlights, finishing second in a pub quiz with a crack English / Kiwi team, and sorting out a solution to ship my bike home.

That last one was really the last major problem sorted which was a huge relief. Shipping by sea turns out to be relatively cheap with almost half the price set aside for making a crate. Mentioning this to Sebastian at BMW in Auckland turned up an offer of a free BMW shipping crate, improving things further. With all that taken care of, it was time to get moving up to Cape Reinga.

Christchurch Part 2

After getting your head around how Christchurch works post-earthquakes, you can find your way around what is still a great city. Still open and going well are the Antarctic Experience near the airport and the Canterbury Museum which is just outside the red zone and had fortunately been re-enforced just a couple of years before the big quakes.

Christchurch is a departure point for most Antarctic exploration with the US maintaining an enormous hangar at the airport to keep all their survey and exploration supplies. Opposite this, a small centre has details of New Zealand’s role in the Antarctic with a tagged on penguin house, because everyone loves penguins! The highlight really is a Hagglund ride, the same Swedish made vehicles that are used in most snow and ice environments around the North and South Pole. An old driver hops in to take a group for a spin out back of the centre showing off how the vehicles can climb and descend incredibly steep angles, pass through water and cross quite large crevasses.

The windchill room - the room stays at -8 and a huge
fan blasts wind so you can experience the difference it makes!

More penguins!

Ivan Mauger's gold plated speedway bike presented when
he won his 3rd world championship. Worth US$0.5m

An old Hagglund vehicle

Back in town though, and next to the botanic gardens – generally worth a look in any city – is the Canterbury Museum. Regulation behind the glass early history exhibits show how Christchurch grew as the most English of all New Zealand cities along a garden city principle. A visiting World of Wearable Art (no photos!) and Ivan Mauger (speedway champion) exhibition were well worth a look, but the main draw is the earthquake room.

Housing a quickly assembled repository of post-quake displays, the room covers the scientific angle with details of all the fault lines in NZ, coupled with rolling video of security camera footage of the quakes happening, and a whole lot more. The security camera footage is at times incredibly powerful with a clock ticking down to the time you know it’s going to happen. People cycle past, cross the road, look in estate agents windows, then suddenly huge chunks of stone masonry fall off several buildings crushing parked cars below, people panic, run into the middle of the road and generally work out how to get as far away from where they are as possible.

Pieces of civic infrastructure such as electricity and water pipes are displayed to show how badly they were stretched and broken, highlighting how impressive it was the electricity was back on in about a week. Water supply was a bit more ad-hoc with a fleet of trucks running in porta-loos to each street corner until the mains were sorted out. Aside from all the information and visuals, huge parts of Christchurch’s cathedral and other important buildings are on display as well as well boards showing well wishes from all corners of the world and little details such as road cones with flowers and other decorations, something the locals took to doing because they were fed up with the amount of boring orange cones everywhere.

Post-quake bridge

A road having being streched sideways

Christmassy road cones

Kiwi's have a way of plain speaking

An 'in-between' project, filling in a cleared site

Just outside the museum is the greatest tribute to the post-earthquake effort, known as Re:start. A collection of temporary shops built on a cleared street brings a riot of colour, interesting shapes and most importantly, people doing normal things such as shopping and drinking coffee back to the city centre. Sometimes from dereliction a fresh start can be produce unexpected outcomes, as in this case which is great to see though there’s a hell of a long way for the city still to go.

Container shops

Re:start shops

Container shops

After a longer than expected stay in Christchurch, I was desperate to get moving again and with a break in what had been relatively poor weather, I decided to finally tackle Arthur’s Pass, a ride people had been saying was a must-do for some time.

28 Feb – 05 Mar: Christchurch Part 1

Christchurch had always been a beacon before I had even set off, a city I’d heard had been through a series of huge earthquakes a couple of years ago, and was at the start of re-building an entire city centre. I’d been looking at job adverts appearing and disappearing from various internet sites whilst I was in Europe, India and Nepal. I’d starting applying for jobs whilst in Nepal, more for the sake of getting my CV out to companies in the city than expecting any immediate return.

The first thing you notice about Christchurch when you arrive is that it sits on an incredibly, pancake flat plain, the other big cities of New Zealand (Auckland, Wellington and Dunedin) are all very hilly (Dunedin even has the steepest residential street in the world!). With Auckland, the sky tower, the tallest building in the southern hemisphere, stands atop a hill the city centre is built around meaning you can see it from everywhere. Wellington is so crammed onto a shoreline between the sea and inland hills, that its forced a number of big skyscrapers to huddle together along the shoreline making it a very simple city to find your way around. Dunedin likewise, the city is along three main roads running lengthways along a harbour, if you’re going up a hill, you’re going into the suburbs.

But Christchurch is so incredibly flat, and known as the ‘garden city’ very leafy which means it’s hard to orientate yourself, stand on any street in the suburbs and it will likely be tree lined, so you never have any idea where the centre is. If you live there, it would make everything feel very homely, like a cluster of little villages, but to find your way round without a map is impossible!

Having found a friend to store my broken panniers, I went off for a walk around the city centre. I'd read on the internet reports that made it sound like the centre was on the verge of a full re-opening, it was a major surprise to see how non-existent it still is. The main problem is three huge skyscrapers (a hotel and two banking offices). Whilst contractors are busy ripping down everything around them, bearing in mind the city centre is about the size of Leeds, it’s taking a long time. The three tall buildings are all condemned so there is a ‘red-zone’ cordon set around a ‘safe toppling zone’ if another major earthquake to hit and the worst was to happen. Indeed, plenty of earthquakes still rumble all the time: http://www.christchurchquakemap.co.nz/largest but it’s the ones above 6 on the Richter Scale that really create problems.

The river Avon doesnt fit its banks properly
as the bottom is full of 'liquefaction', a silt like
mud that comes up through the ground during earthquakes

Damaged homes in the suburbs, the house is sinking
and the roof is damaged. It is scheduled for demolition
so the garden is overgrown as no-one lives here.

A bridge that has raised up from its normal level
but has been repaired and passable with care

Homes in Sumner where a cliff has given way

Shipping containers protect traffic on the road from rock slides

It’s impossible to make sense of a situation where a city has its centre ripped out, so a whole still functioning major city has to go to work, shop, and be entertained in its suburbs, a real ‘doughnut’ city if there ever was one. What’s even more unusual is to see a Kiwi city looking a mess. New Zealander’s have a fanatical devotion to keeping things neat and tidy so it’s rare to see a city like Christchurch with overgrowing gardens, potholed roads and collapsing fences. With so many people moving out, most streets have a series of empty homes that have been left to nature either because jobs moved elsewhere or they were ‘red-stickered’ as condemned by surveyors.

Damaged buildings just outside the red zone

Bracing on civic buildings

Opposite the civic buildings -
a statue by Mackenzie thorpe
outside the dyslexic institute

The old city centre behind barriers

As with most people watching news reports of the earthquake, I had no idea how bad the situation was. With a relatively low number of reported deaths in the first few days, then with the Japanese tsunami grabbing news headlines soon after, it was easy to fail to notice what had happened here. The 180+ deaths, though relatively low, had a profound effect on the city. In the rest of the world, people say you’re never more than seven steps removed from knowing someone, on the South Island of New Zealand, it’s closer to two, so almost anyone you speak to will know someone who had lost their life. This combined with the loss of everything that made Christchurch great – a huge sports stadium, world class music arena venue, a city centre that Lonely Planet had named the no.1 best thing to see in the whole of New Zealand, all of which are being slowly pulled apart, has had a profound effect on local people. There isnt much 'old' architecure in New Zealand, the grand town halls and city centres that Europeans are used to. What there was was mostly in Christchurch. Much of it has now gone leaving just a question of what will come next and the inevitable concern that it won't be as good.

There is little information about the earthquakes around town, the centre still looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland, but what there is can be found in the Canterbury museum - and that'll be in my next update.