NZ Day 25: A last day of riding
Fun fact: New Zealand has more cute roadside ponds per capita than any place else in the southern hemisphere.
New Zealand is awash in cute roadside ponds!
(Note: Today’s Fun Fact has not been peer-reviewed.)
We slept in late, and checked out of the Plateau Lodge even later. The 12-mile mountain hike we did yesterday was probably slowing us down. What a surprise!
Nevertheless, we were in good spirits. It was all downhill to Taurmaranui and the weather was fantastic. Plus I was all stocked up on dark chocolate:
Roadside chocolate break!
In the photo you can see the New Zealand flag attached to the bike. It was part of my fabulous plan to boost our visibility to drivers, but in retrospect it was mostly a nuisance. If it was smaller I could have attached it to a pole like recumbent riders usually do. Oh well… Wisdom for the next trip.
Knowing how much we obsessed about weight, it’s odd that I didn’t just discard the flag somewhere along the way. But on the other hand, when you’re visiting a country, you shouldn’t throw their flag in the trash – that’s just rude!
There's the mountain we hiked near two days ago - Mt Ngauruhoe - free of clouds for the first time in a week.
During the chocolate break I looked back to the east and saw Mt Ngauruhoe – free of clouds for the first time in a week. The weather wasn’t that clear yesterday when we hiked it. It’s true what the locals say: The mountain makes its own weather system, and it’s only sometimes related to what goes on around it.
Looking to the north I saw what looked like a smaller, flatter version of Ngauruhoe.
I believe that plateau is called Mt Komokoriri. (That's based on a guess from looking at www.topomap.co.nz .)
In the evening I got obsessed and spent an entire hour on the laptop, browsing around topograpic maps trying to identify the plateau. My best guess was that it’s Mt Komokoriri?
Since it was the last day we would be riding cross-country, I decided to do what I did for the first day, and record some video. This time I attached the camera to the front of the recumbent instead of my helmet. “Now it’ll be nice and steady!” I declared. Nope. Every single tiny ridge on the pavement made the camera jitter like crazy. It looked like I was riding a bicycle with square wheels.
About halfway through the ride we stopped to chat with some outdoorsmen walking along the road.
Friends we met while cycling down from National Park, including Mark the photographer.
The guy on the right is Mark Watson, a nature photographer and fellow cycling enthusiast. I barraged him with questions about photography equipment and techniques, which he answered gracefully.
Stopping for photos of a mountain and seeing smoke in the air
Second video:
Checking in: I’d grown quite a beard.
Resting up after an easy day's riding!
I spent a non-trivial amount of vacation time like this, futzing with photos. Fun!
Odd sockets and switches:
This is how you know the hotel was built a while ago!