Long Cloud Ride: A Cycling Adventure Across New Zealand
Josie Dew
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0751535842
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
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