Monthly Archives: January 2007

Diary of a Car Camper – New Zealand

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Not ours, but I wish it was...

Not ours, but I wish it was...

We’re starting kind of a second leg of our stay here in New Zealand, the bikes are gone and we’re renting a car for the rest of the trip. Of course it’s going to give our legs a break and let us have a lot more range in terms of where we can go and what we can see in a day. But it will also help us out in other ways – when we were on bikes we could really only buy enough food to get us through the day, now we can get a cooler and buy stuff that will last us a few days.

We got really lucky on the rental. We were looking for a two week, one way rental from Christchurch to Auckland, and expecting to pay extra for the one way bit. But, it seems Christchurch has too many rentals and Auckland too few – so we’re getting a car that normally rents for 49 NZD for 19 NZD (About 14 USD), and it comes with unlimited mileage and insurance. What a bargain!

Yes, a bargain. The downside is it’s a 1996 Toyota Corolla that I can only imagine has flipped it’s odometer about a dozen times. And while it has radio and tape player, it has only one speaker – you read that right. It’s not that the other speakers don’t work. It shipped from the factory with only one speaker – who could ask for anything more? When you’re in the drivers seat and you have the system cranked you can kind of hear the tinny treble bits of the music that’s about it.

Driving is a lot easier than riding, but at the end of the day it’s actually more tiring I think. We’ve done several long days already – with more to come – and I have to say when driving you still end the day and feel like you need a nap, but you don’t have the sense of accomplishment or the endorphins you have when you complete a day of bike riding. Of well, they’re small islands, but we still need the car to see everything we want to on them.

Well be having some long days from Christchurch we’ll jump down to Milford Sound then up the West Coast of the South Island, then back over to the east where we take a ferry back to the North Island. You get the picture. Luckily the miles are included.

Cycling New Zealand – That’s a Wrap

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Lets Stick a Fork in this one LeeAnne

Lets Stick a Fork in this one LeeAnne

We are back in Christchurch finally, after spending the past few weeks biking the South Island. From here we rent a car and head to the west coast over the mountains and then back up to the North Island. We consider ourselves much wiser now, if you, or someone you love is entertaining the idea of cycling in New Zealand we offer a few humble suggestions:

  • If you can, bring your own bike – We couldn’t and it hurt.
  • If you can’t bring your own bike, rent something very similar to what you ride at home – We ride road bikes at home but rented (very nice) hybrids. Trouble is we found that once you’re use to a road bike, it’s hard to go back to that hybrid.
  • Crazy steep hills
  • Traffic – The road system down here is not as well developed as it is in North America or Europe. There are fewer roads and fewer routes; you will be sharing the blacktop with logging trucks, semi’s, emergency vehicles and tourists in camer-vans.
  • Finally, if you can get past all the other stuff, there are a lot of magnificent views, great wildlife to see, and very nice people to meet along the way.

Two highlights of the last leg of the journey (back up the east coast) were certainly the boulders at Moeraki, and the blue penguins of Oamaru.

The boulders at Moeraki are technically “septarian concretions”, the crud from the magma vents of dead volcanos. They’re about 60 million years old and they look like 40 or 50 bowling balls (5 foot tall bowling balls) sitting on the beach, partially concealed in the tide.

Oamaru is home to a colony of blue penguins. Just after dusk you can go down to a place between the docks and an old quarry and watch them surf in in groups or 10 or 15 apeice. The night we were there I think we saw 40 or more come on shore and waddle into the bush where they make their nests.

Oamaru itself is a really teriffic old port town just north of Dunedin. All of the buildings in the downtown area were built from a white limestone quarry just outside of town around the end of the 19th century and there is a very fin-de-siecle vibe in the town. At night you feel like you’ve been dropped onto a period movie set. I wish we could have stayed longer to get a better look at the place.

Dunedin – San Francisco of the South?

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Tribal Graffitti

Tribal Graffitti

New Zealand is a very hilly place. Dunedin is the MOST hilly place we have been yet in the country. In fact it’s the home of the steepest street in the world – Baldwin Street. And the motorway in to town – the main artery for cars trucks etc. in or out, is built on a crazy 11% grade. Have these people never heard of tunnels? Throw me a bone here. Anyway, it almost makes you think that the founders of this place weren’t that concerned with the rest of New Zealand, and for todays residents that may still be true.

Dunedin is called the “Edinborough of the South”, which I guess makes sense as Dunedin (pronounced as if you were saying “Ma, I’m done eatin’” really fast) is the original Gaelic name of Edinborough – before the English made ‘em change it ya see. And while I’ve never been to Edinborough, this place does remind me of a city in the U.S. with stupid steep hills, built around a harbor, home to a chocolate factory, with lots of art-school students: San Francisco.

Tell me there’s not a resemblance! The hills, the harbor, Dunedin is home to the New Zealand franchise of the Cadbury Empire and the largest university in New Zealand. Now just try to remember what SF was like before the dot coms arrived, shrink it down by a factor of 5, and make it Scottish – ladies and gents I give you Dunedin!