I did a sneaky thing, it took about 6 or 7 years of hard work and nagging but I finally convinced my family to move to Dunedin. The key was finding a really cool job, so we are now actually on the move. There are so many things to look forward to about Dunedin and the South Island and there are so many beautiful places to go and see. And I am super excited for the future of small GAS adventures given Steve and I will be living in the same town!!
And what better way to get the new normal underway, but with a short adventure to celebrate the move. As it happened, quite coincidentally, Steve had booked a week off work for the exact week I proposed an adventure. A good omen! The plan was that I needed to get my bike to Dunedin, so why not just take a day or two extra between jobs and ride it down from Wellington the slightly longer way – perfect!
So with minimal planning we started with the general idea that we’d meet in Tekapo and take a couple of days to find our way back to Dunedin, missing as many main roads as we possibly could! I set off from Wellington, this was it, after 12 years I was leaving for a new home. It was weird, exciting, surreal and a bit lonely as I got onto the ferry by myself. But I was on an adventure and that outdid the loneliness by some way.
I arrived at my parents in Renwick outside of Blenheim about midnight, and had a quick breakfast with them before hitting the long ride to Tekapo, just a cool 563km via the Inland Scenic Route. Now have you ever gone down the Inland SCENIC Route, inland from Christchurch, through random places like Starvation Hill, Windwhistle & Pudding Hill. This must be what Cantabrians think scenery is, well, it’s flat and straight and pretty bloody boring to be honest! It’s beautiful for about 30 seconds as you cross the Rakaia River up near the mountains and then it’s flat and straight and pretty bloody boring again.
I ended up smashing out the kms, at one stage averaging over 100km/hr for 2 hours which I thought was pretty good going. The only blessing on the boredom was it was a stunning day, more like summer than late winter. After feeling like I was smashing it out all day, I arrived in Tekapo just 15 minutes before Steve. We headed off to the campground to find a place to crash, followed by an evening in the Tekapo hotpools bathed in the stunningly starry skies. What a spot to hang out for a couple of hours!
Our mission for our first full day together looked like heading down to Benmore and up through Black Forest Station and back down the Hakataramea Pass, which we achieved exactly none of!! About 5kms out of Tekapo we decided to take the back route via gravel road over to Lake Pukaki to near Braemar Station, Steve had done home stays at Braemar when he ran tours around here many moons ago. We arrived on the shores of a stunning Lake Pukaki with Mt Cook gleaming up in the alps and instead of heading on towards our plan for the day we headed off up the lake and found ourselves at Mt Cook Station near the head of the lake. What a spot, we could not believe how beautiful it was up here!
And it only got better, we took a look around and found a little trail heading further up the lake – it was the Alps 2 Ocean cycle trail, we debated whether it was a trail for motorbikes and decided that it must be so headed on. We found beauty, fun, adventure and summer in abundant quantities!! The trails were super fun to ride on and the views of Mt Cook just got better and better. The last little section before the trail ran out into the Tasman River (river running out from Tasman Glacier, the largest glacier in NZ) got pretty rough and rocky, but we powered on and almost made it to the end….until I dropped my bike trying to stop to look at the views!! And flooded it! So what better excuse to stop for a picnic and some sunbathing basically at the base of Mt Cook in very early Spring, it was hard to believe how roasty toasty it was that far up into the mountains.
After a break and a laugh about how, to complete the Alps 2 Ocean Cycle trail, you need to get a helicopter to carry your bike from the Mt Cook airport to where we were on the other side of the Tasman River, which is about 2km, but we’re sure isn’t cheap. Nice business plan whoever came up with that one!! We decided that maybe we should try and achieve something that we set out to at the start of the day so headed back down hoping to get into Black Forest. We got back to Mt Cook Station and stopped for a couple of photos before heading on.
I went first onto the dusty gravel road, and assumed Steve was just behind me, but for all the dust I couldn’t see anything in my mirrors so cruised on. I got to the end of the gravel and waited…..and waited…..and waited…..mmmmmm. No Steve, what’s going on here! Fortunately there was some data coverage, the beauty of the tourist trail being on the other side of the lake and he’d messaged saying he’d had a puncture, and I had the puncture repair kit, BUGGER!! Off back up the gravel road I headed!!
As it turned out Steve had made it about 1km down the road while I covered about 60km in backtracking to him, bugger! We headed up to Mt Cook Station and found the station owner, an old fella by the name of……….actually we can’t remember his name. Anyway, he’d actually bought the station for his daughter, but he was helping her out with it while also running another station nearby. As you’d expect from a high country farmer, he was a super nice guy, with a bunch of stories to boot, and as fit as a fiddle for an old dude! He was happy to help so we repaired the puncture as best we could, which turned out to be a pretty rubbish job!! But enjoyed the company and the sunshine while we did it, pretty random to be hanging out on a high country station fixing a puncture, but all in a days adventure really!!
And for the 4th time for me, we headed off down the gravel road heading for Black Forest, until we stopped to check the tyre, and it was slowly deflating again!! Dammit!! But right at that moment another random high country dude stopped in his ute. We had a quick yarn and he was happy to put the bike of the back at his truck and take Steve and the bike in to Twizel, where the closest garage to get a new tube would be. What a stroke of luck! After a bit of too-ing and fro-ing we squeezed the bike on the back and headed off to Twizel, arriving just in time to get things lined up for a repair first thing in the morning.
The final part of the day’s adventure was to find somewhere to sleep, so we managed to get a drop off at the local campground from the mechanic on his way home. As Steve was halfway through erecting his tent he stopped and let out an expletive. Hang on a minute, his sister’s family-in-law had a holiday house in Twizel and a few phone calls later found us bunking down in a sweet little holiday house, one of those typical NZ baches that has so many beds in the place it’s a bit ridiculous! The final laugh/adventure of the day happened as we headed for some food; a dude at the campground had recommended The Razza (short for the RSA pub), “cheap and bloody good” is how he described it. So we tucked into some scrumptious pub food while being entertained by the local’s who’d had a pint or two too many. A few games of pool with them and a lot laughs later we headed home to hit the sack. What a random and unplanned day, but what a bloody good day of adventure!
Day two of the adventure started back at the garage, while we waited for the tyre repair. Eventually we were all fixed and on our way again, heading for Omarama and we weren’t quite sure after that. The sun had disappeared this morning and we froze ourselves in the early spring high country morning air. In Omarama we decided to head straight down the Waitaki Valley for Dansey’s Pass as opposed to trying again for Black Forest and the Hakataramea. We did stop in briefly at Otematata Station to check out a road through Mt Buster that we’d spied on Google satellite images and the farmer was happy to offer it up as an option for a summer ride, but not today. Something for the future….
So off we went to Dansey’s Pass, with a brief stop at the back gate to Black Forest Station….Steve had forgotten the gate lock code, so as it turns out we might not have been able to go through that way yesterday anyway!!! Funny how things work out sometimes!! Dansey’s Pass is a shortcut from the Waitaki Valley across to Naseby and Ranfurly, and it’s a pretty spectacular bit of road, although it actually feels like three separate passes. The last “pass” (actually Dansey’s Pass) tops out at 935m and it was still cold enough for some snow to be lying around on the ground. It was a cool spot, and had a really funky high country feeling up there. But then coming down the other side was super steep on loose gravel, fun times but certainly not racing times!!
We stopped for lunch at Dansey’s Pass Hotel, what a spot that is. It is an old Coach Inn, dating back to 1862, a beautiful old inn tucked right up in the hills. We had a feast and looked at what options we had for the afternoon given the time we had before the sun went down. We considered a few things but decided on being as ambitious as possible. The plan was to head up the Ida Valley and up past Manorburn and hope that we found a trail that led us out to the Maniatoto or down towards Millers Flat. We weren’t really sure but figured that we’d be able to find some way back to Dunedin. So off we raced, down through Naseby, and up the Ida Valley at a very quick pace given the limited daylight left. We got a bit lucky with some fuel in Oturehua at a truck stop that doesn’t normally serve the general public and raced on to the gated entrance to the Manorburn area. As we pulled up a couple of locals turned up in utes, and after some chatting we found out that everywhere bar the main roads were locked down as it was still too early after winter. Another dammit situation!!! It seems not many of our actual plans have been achieved thus far.
So, the only option left was to head out to Alexandra and down the main road through Roxburgh but we had one last option to head through Waipori Forest to get one last little bit of adventure completed before I arrived “home” for the first time. We left the gate and spotted a road up into the hills that we knew headed in the direction of Alex, so tried it out. It arrived at a small little pass over what turns out to be the Crawford Hills, it was surprising pretty. We love that feeling of something failing, and just moving on to look for something else and little surprises like this popping up to give us that little bit of surprise and joy. It reinforces the fun of adventure but also the importance of minimising emphasis on being to set in your plans. If you’re flexible with what your “adventure” could be, then anything that happens and brings the joy can turn into a feel-good moment! We love those moments!!
We raced on through Alexandra, Roxburgh and Lawerence before leaving the main drag for a final jaunt in the setting sun and fading light through the Waipori Forest. It was nice to finish off on some gravel and isolation. It’s such a buzz to find little spots of beauty and isolation, and it reminds us that there are so many great spots just about anywhere you go. We buzzed on back to Steve’s place in Mosgiel, with one final moment of the lights of Dunedin glowing as we came down off the plateau behind Outram – it felt like the lights of home were guiding me in. Pretty cool moment!
So, we’d tried our hardest to have some plans for our little unplanned adventure, and achieved just about none of it. But did it stop us, not in the slightest – we found fun, beauty and adventure in good doses. We let the adventure flow in whatever way it chose and achieved what felt like a hell of a lot in two days. This is the type of little jaunt that reminds me of some of our old mantras – get out there and do it and remember not to waste a day!!!
