Day 15: Dunedin to Waihola

Journal for 2014-11-03 | Published on 2014-11-03 00:03:43

After a mostly calm night the hostel, except for that one woman at 2am who was talking very loudly and meowing, we woke up to take an opportunity to Skype with Penny and finish up some tasks on the internet. Breakfast was at a little café down the street. It seems that Kiwi’s do not go out to eat breakfast, there are very few places that even serve breakfast and the entire time were in the café not a single other person entered.

Packed up and got our bikes out of the office and hit the road. Leaving Dunedin was interesting as we were unaccustomed to the volume of cars on the road and the entire city was built on every hill they could possibly find. It actually seemed pretty quick to go from downtown to out of the city and we were on the Southern Scenic Route.

From there the directions were simple, go straight until we hit the mouth of the Taeiri River. We ended up riding right next to the beach for a good while and it was very pretty. The water is teal blue and the sand is golden, the waves were forming a nice surf, too bad the air temperature was 12C, brrr.

Shortly along the way Pam noticed that her brake levers were not aligned, it seemed that one of them had slipped down the handlebars. We spent some time on the side of the road trying to fix a piece of our bikes that neither of us had ever worked on or really knew anything about. Eventually we got it more properly aligned and functional, minus one piece that we couldn’t get in place, and rode on.

We knew there was a chance for rain in the afternoon and a few drops started falling, we kept riding through hoping to escape the rain. Finally we thought we had and the sky cleared up…. For about 5 minutes… Then we saw bands of rain in the distance headed for us and stopped to don the rain pants.

Rain pants on we started riding and the rain just disappeared, none to be seen. The wind really started picking up and was as volatile as always, but never in a direction that favored us. It wasn’t as bad as on the rail trail, but it was enough to be very annoying and tiring. We battled on through the wind for some time and eventually some light rain.

All the while there were overlooks and pullouts that showed off the beauty of the NZ coast. The wind just kept battering us, and we were cursing all the sheep farmers in the area for having nothing but grass on the fields. When we passed lines of trees it was amazing how much it cut the wind, but those grass fields, and apparently the sheep themselves, give no resistance to the fierce winds.

We made our way in the town of Taieri Mouth and crossed the Taieri River for the last time. This was potential stopping point number 1 for the day, but we still had 5 hours of daylight left and it was “only” 12km to the next town. We stubbornly elected to keep going, but first Pam needed to shed a layer of clothes, so off came the rain gear.

Well it turns out that the first two kilometers out of Taieri Mouth were about a 9-14% grade. We knew it was a climb but didn’t except the steepness nor the duration, so we wasted a lot of energy pedaling up the lower portion of the hill. Only to find that the hill never ended, or so it seemed. So we started walking the bikes up the hill, and it started to rain, hard. After a bit we paused for Pam to put back on the rain gear, to which it stopped raining. It was just one of those days.

Well a combination of walking and riding got us ¾ of the way up the hill and the rain really started coming down so we both put on our shoe covers. That of course caused the clouds to part and blue sky to appear directly above us. Undeterred we left the shoe covers on and successfully didn’t see another rain drop until we pulled in to camp.

On the other side of the hills we were treated to some nice steep declines and got to at last enjoy the crazy steep grades of these NZ roads. We were heading down a 12% grade at 55kmh for some time before we pulled in to the small town of Waihola. The rain was starting again and we quickly got the holiday park for a place to stay. With the heavy winds/rains we elected to try a cabin/hut for the night, with a heater and an outlet it feels like luxury compared to tent camping it wet/windy weather.

Dinner was the usual pasta/sauce/cheese. This holiday park is rather old, and has recently been acquired by new owners, so we were happy to have hot showers, but couldn’t get a single burner in the kitchen to produce enough heat to boil water. So we were rather surprised to find that they did have WIFI.

Thanks for the comments and reading!

Distance:48.79km

Time: 4:07

Average: 11.82kmh

Max Speed: 56.4kmh

Climbed: 781m