Long Cloud Ride: A Cycling Adventure Across New Zealand

Long Cloud Ride: A Cycling Adventure Across New Zealand

Josie Dew

Language: English

Pages: 352

ISBN: 0751535842

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


After two months on board a Russian container ship sailing 15,000 miles across the world, Josie finally arrives in New Zealand with her bike. Over the next nine months she cycles 10,000 kilometers all over North and South Islands while experiencing the wettest, windiest, and stormiest year on record. During this time Josie was spat at, shouted at, honked at, and both run off and blown off the road. She got soaked, sunburned, hailed on, and snowed on; and was alternately starved and overfed, overcharged and under-charged. Then there was the wildlife—the possums (both dead and alive); exotic birds such as moreporks (with their eerie call) and fantails (who decided to follow); the ostriches, who liked to chase English cyclists and the harriers, who liked to dive bomb them; and the more familiar but no less frustrating farm animals, who provided sheep-jams and cow-blocks to slow Josie down. Josie brings New Zealand brilliantly to life. Warm, witty, and acutely observed as ever, her latest adventure is sure to delight old and new fans alike.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

medley of lanes empty of traffic apart from the odd farmer’s pick-up and steel Fonterra milk tanker with their ‘I TURN OFTEN!’ warning signs across their tailgate. This is sheep and cattle country. The rumpled blanket of green pastures and hills are full of sheep stations. Not just a fluffy handful of sheep like back home, but vast cascades of undulating wool. The sheep pens apparently have a capacity of 50,000. Some of the roads around Hatuma were very English-like, lined with tunnels of oaks

track that my map told me was Ure Road – a dead-end road that wove its way deeper into the valley alongside Waima (‘ask your mother’) River to a pretty non-existent-looking place called Kilgram. On the southern edge of Kilgram rose Isolated Hill overlooking Headache Stream. But well before this place of neuralgic remoteness, I came across an old farmhouse set amid a beautiful garden and trees, one of which was a cabbage tree. Trying to steady themselves with a loud flapping of wings while

know his arse from his elbow, stood looking at the car with dazed befuddlement. Had Gary been here, I bet he would have rolled up his sleeves and been under the car like a shot, knife clamped between teeth and various assortments of spanners and strips of wire and zip-ties clasped in hand. A few minutes of whistling later, he would emerge with black hands and a splattering of oil streaks on his face, then throw up the bonnet and fiddle with something in the murky inner depths of the engine before

think New Zealand produces such chaotic weather and uncanny clouds due to its position in the world – out on a limb sandwiched between the volatile Tasman and the whimsical Pacific. Added to this mixture, cold air rushes up from Antarctica to collide with warm tropical air spilling in from the north. Thus meteorological anarchy ensues. From the Rail Trail I started weaving my way north before cycling the road from Kurow (‘argumentative queuing system’) to Omarama (‘Bananarama’s mother’) twice.

was banking on hungrily scoffing a pannier-load of fodder once seated on the bus. But Lindsay was having none of it. ‘I allow no eating or drinking on my bus,’ he said, ‘because I’m sick of clearing up other people’s chunder off the seats and carpet.’ Well, it’s amazing how much you can eat surreptitiously behind a hand, even when sitting up front behind the rule-making driver as he keeps an eye on you in his mirror. Apart from his no-eating regulation, Lindsay was a good and informative soul

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