NZ Day 6: Waipu Wandering

We got a decent amount of sleep, and it was all downhill into central Whangarei to catch the shuttle directly to Waipu. This would mark our first diverging from the schedule we’d meticulously prepared over the previous two months. We would be skipping the Waipu caves and their dark ceilings, sparkling with glow-worms, but we would also be skipping another several thousand feet of hills, as steep as the ones that punished us on that first day of riding. Now we knew our limitations, and we knew this was a necessary change.

The bicycles fit sideways into the luggage compartment under the bus without any acrobatics, and we piled our bags around them, except for our backpacks which we were too paranoid to relinquish. My rough estimate is that we were carrying about $11000 worth of gear in those backpacks, mostly in the form of camera lenses. That’s pretty absurd, especially since we could have left half that gear at home and barely changed our enjoyment of the trip.

The green countryside scrolled by, and we found ourselves in Waipu before my stomach had a chance to notice it was on a bus and get upset – a childish behavior that it picked up years ago when I was riding commuter shuttles to work. We stepped off into an early autumn day with a fresh breeze and just a hint of ocean salt, and a few minutes later we had our gear reassembled and were riding back down the main street of Waipu, looking for our hotel, and for a place to get snacks.

The motel room was cheap, but dingy and cramped. The single-pane window opened directly onto a parking space. All the usual hardware was stacked in a corner – television on top of VCR on top of mini-fridge, unplugged and dusty. We stripped the bikes down, hauled the bags inside, then hauled the bikes in after. The room was now incredibly cramped, but we didn’t care – it was time to go out and get snacks!

The restaurant across from the hotel was excellent. Actually, it was as good as the hotel was bad! We ate burgers and salad, and drank cider at a spacious table. Encouraged by the weather, we decided to go out riding and see what else we could find. What we found was a pastoral paradise.

We rode out through a ragged patchwork of lush green fields, crisscrossed by slow rivers along soft banks of mud and sand, and threaded by dirt roads with deep ruts and high shoulders of tangled late-summer grass. Dark horses, cream-colored sheep, and speckled cows meandered their way along, nibbling on grass or lounging in the sun, between fences of rusty wire and wooden posts. Across all this blew a steady coastal breeze, fresh but not cold, weaving into the trees and carrying the scent of the sea, and higher up, carrying along an army of fleecy white clouds, sailing like galleons in the sky. It was like riding around inside everyone’s collective hallucination of the perfect day in the countryside. A living daydream, filling up every kind of sense.

It was a feeling like the one I felt in western Kansas, on a particular day when I was bicycling there three years ago. Not exactly the same; the Kansas air had been warmer, and pungent with the smell of old grass and wet soil. A Halloween smell. Waipu was bringing me a younger, lighter smell – something like Easter. Looking around, I would not have felt surprised to see little pastel eggs tucked into the hollows of trees, and peeking out from rabbit holes.

Savoring this vivid impression, I stopped by the side of the road and dug a chocolate bar out of my saddlebag. A hundred feet away, Kerry pedaled up to a horse behind a low fence, but it saw her coming and backed nervously away, intimidated by the combined size of bicycle and rider. Kerry chastised the horse for being a scaredy-cat, and giggled. “Silly horse,” I said, talking casually over our headsets. “Doesn’t it know that bicyclists always have snacks?”

Once again, all the effort of hauling these awkward bicycle contraptions around felt absolutely worth it. We were traveling within, not just passing through.

We pedaled around the area north of town, then came back and made a left turn, headed towards the sea. The road curved around and undulated over a few gentle hills. Nothing intimidating like what we saw the day before, thank goodness. We stopped in a random spot, peed behind some bushes, then flopped down in the grass and chomped through a bag full of bubble gum. This is how a day of cycling is supposed to go! Not a death march, but a long string of roadside picnics.

“I’m still getting used to the idea of spending an entire day riding a bike,” Kerry said. “I mean, not pedaling the whole time obviously, but… It’s strange being ‘in transit’ for so long, you know? I’m used to riding a bike to get somewhere. So I get this feeling of impatience, like, we should just never stop, and pedal hard, so we can hurry up and get to the next town, the next thing. But I know that’s not the right way to think about it, so I’m pushing back against that idea in my head. That’s taking effort, but I think I can get there. We’ll see. Still, it’s good that we’re doing other stuff too and not just bicycling day after day like some of the trips you’ve taken.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t expect you to like bicycling as much as I do. You’d have to be as crazy as I am; and that’s pretty crazy. But I’m really happy you’re here with me.”

“Awww,” she said, and gave me a hug.

We rode on, and about a half mile later we rolled around a corner and found the water – a long shallow inlet with pasture on either side, sweeping out to connect with the deeper ocean, kinked by a few bars of white sand, and with a thin crest of surf sketching out the interface between the incoming waves and the receding tide. Just up from the shore on our side of the inlet was an old graveyard, the headstones bleached and weather-beaten in some cases and sharp and shiny in others, all behind a fence with a single strand of electrified wire strung along it in plastic brackets, to keep the cows from crapping on the dead. We parked our bikes and went strolling around.

You can tell we’re only out for the day because the bicycle in the picture is lacking about 40 pounds of extra gear!

Seeing this coastal graveyard and this blue ocean and these huge clouds brought a lot of other associations to mind. Some musical, some literary. Sting’s “The Soul Cages” echoed through my ears. Fragments of poetry by Robert Louis Stevenson. Images etched into my imagination when I read “The Sea Wolf” in the 7th grade. I felt detached from my own era, but it wasn’t a disorienting feeling; it was a comfortable one. This graveyard by the sea was telling me something.

“Here is an environment, a source of sensations, that you cannot make your individual stamp upon, no matter what you try. Even solid stone, etched with descriptions of who you were and what you did, and placed here, will simply wear away into an anonymous blob in a thousand years, and it will be millions more years before this place even begins to look slightly different, from exactly how it looked a million years before you passed through. Maybe the shoreline will have a different shape but it will still be the same shore. All the poems written, all the ships built and launched, all the perfect picnic days and garbage left behind in human history compresses down to a thought … an afterthought, even … and I could be anyone standing here. Or no one.”

“But is that really true? Humans do have a collective impact, after all. In seven thousand years we managed to create the Sahara Desert from grassland, with help from domesticated animals. Some people say that 15000 years ago the Great Plains was forested and only became grass because humans kept setting fires. Others say the forest retreated naturally as the glaciers melted away. And, we’re certainly good at mass extinction…”

Abruptly I realized I’d been staring at the same distant sandbar for an entire minute. I walked back to my bike and stowed the camera. Time to ride out for snacks!

Kerry chatted with a few people sitting around in lawn chairs, dangling fishing poles down into the water. They told her that if we wanted to swim at a proper beach, we should cycle only “a kilometer or so” down the road and we’d find one, along with a general store. That sounded good.

Of course, “a kilometer or so” turned out to be four or five miles. We were both rapidly coming to the conclusion that New Zealanders could not be trusted to give accurate estimates of distance. It’s probably not Kiwis in particular, it’s probably just people who drive cars and don’t bicycle. Back home, most people have at least tried bicycling. In New Zealand, people ride mountain bikes on tracks, but touring seems to be strictly for tourists. The idea of using a bicycle to get from one town to another seems absurd to just about everyone we’ve talked to here…

Eventually we did find a nice beach, and a nice general store. Many snacks were snacked upon.

I’ve never seen such a perfect demonstration of a beach forming from millions of discarded shells!

We collected a bunch of them and took a few photos, then left them around for kids to find. No sense hauling them back to the hotel.

As the afternoon moved on to evening, the shadows got deeper and more lush. Even though we were riding back the way we came, along the same road, everything looked different.

Whenever the temptation came upon us to stop and eat a snack, or take a photograph, we just went with it. The landscape seemed to be taunting us to find the right collection of buttons and switches that would capture the perfect photograph. Vacation with gadgets! Fun stuff.

Even the clouds got in on the act!

When we got back to town, I felt hungry and Kerry felt tired, so she took a nap and I walked over to the same restaurant, and went though the day’s photographs.

Kerry’s nap didn’t last long, though: A bunch of Waipu locals gathered in the pub to watch the latest cricket game. Their shouts and laughter went straight through the thin walls of the hotel. Minus one star!

In the original schedule, Waipu was just a handy town to spend the night after exploring the Waipu Caves, but it turned out to be a fun place to explore in its own right, and very restorative. Kerry and I went to bed feeling a lot more refreshed than we’d been the previous night in Whangarei.

Good thing too, since the next day we’d be stuck in shuttles for six hours!

NZ Day 2: Kayaking Around Limestone Island

We flew in to Whangarei (actually pronounced more like “Phongaray” due to some interesting linguistic shenanigans) because there are a lot of different outdoorsy things to do in only a short distance. The closest among these is kayaking, and for that we made a reservation with Mark (pronounced more like “Mahk” due some cool kiwi accent shenanigans) of Pacific Coast Kayaks.

We were both pretty tired, but game for an adventure. Plus it would be a nice break from tinkering with bicycle parts.

He picked us up right from the hotel with all the gear we needed, and it was only a few minutes to the beach. Along the way we chatted about ourselves. “You’re a musician of some kind, aren’t you?” he asked. “I like to think I am,” I said. “Great! I thought so,” he said. “There’s something we’ll see during the tour that I think you’ll like a lot.” Intriguing!

The beach itself was quite colorful, and littered with many shells that would have been snatched up by curious kids in an instant if they’d been spotted back home in the Bay Area.

While we got ready, a few birds checked us out. They lingered next to a dead crab that washed ashore near the kayaks, until one bird in particular landed and scared the rest of them away, by ducking its head down, fluffing its wings up, and charging straight across the ground at the other birds, screaming “RAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!”

I could easily imagine a flightless dinosaur doing the same thing, millions of years ago. Coincidence?

Eventually, we were all ready to go. Look at those goofy excited grins!

Our first ride on the kayaks went directly across the bay towards the east side of Limestone Island to check out the ruins of the old lime refinery. The sea was a bit choppy, and we were too nervous to get our cameras out, but we made it to the shore without incident and went strolling around.

There were some handy signs around to tell us about the restoration efforts, and the geography of the island. They also warned us about the animal traps:

As a human you’d have to work pretty hard to injure yourself in that, but stoats can just walk right in…

The ruins were gorgeous, even on this overcast day. It was interesting to see the different styles of architecture and engineering used during the two phases of the refinery’s history, in the 1850’s and the 1880’s. Everything made of wood is of course long gone, but with some imagination you could almost see how the structures came together. Mark pointed out a barracks, and a cement foundation that was all that remained of a dance hall.

In fact, Mark knew a great deal about the island, from the Māori occupation all the way up to the present-day ecological efforts, and he told it to us while we hiked around taking pictures. In the above photo he’s explaining how that mound of dirt was deliberately shoved in front of the furnace opening to try and keep tourists from wandering inside and getting hit by loose masonry. Not a complete success, given how the plastic fence is bent out of shape. Hah!

One of the main attractions was the giant multi-chamber processing tank, built right next to a hillside with unrefined chunks of limestone practically spilling out of it. We looked at those for a while and then wandered inside, where we discovered the surprise that Mark told me about: Inside the high walls of the tank, you can play the exposed rebar like a xylophone!

So, of course, we jammed for a while.

The next attraction was even more amazing, I think. We left Limestone Island and set out on a hard route into the wind, east and then south, and eventually reached the entrance to a mangrove forest. The tide was rushing inward, and from there we mostly set our oars aside, and rode on the current all the way through the forest, from east to west. I took out my phone and made a time-lapse recording of part of the journey.

It was amazing. And as we went deeper into the forest, the weird mixing of ocean and sky intensified, until it was like drifting around inside an optical illusion.

You know that scene in Spirited Away where the main character travels across a water-drowned landscape while piano music plays? This was that, in real life.

I would have taken the kayak deeper, but the scrape and crunch of branches turned me away.

Eventually we emerged into an area about the size of a football field where the water was about 10 inches deep, clear, and dotted with tiny emerging mangrove shrubs. It was there I encountered my first piece of rare New Zealand litter (and compared to the Bay Area, it really is rare) – a large glass bottle, about the size of a wine bottle, filled with sand and plant debris. I reached down and pried it out, rinsed it a few times, and stowed it inside the kayak for recycling.

Just keeping things tidy for the next guy…

Our next stop was back on Limestone Island, for lunch. Mark made us some very tasty sandwiches. We also met the resident groundskeeper, and I spotted one of the ten zillion cicadas hiding in the foliage.

From there we went on, circling the rest of the island.

We checked out some cool rock formations …

… and landed at another beach so we could check out the remains of the foreman’s residence.

When all the walls were plastered and the windows were intact, it must have been quite lovely. Now instead it looks mysterious and gloomy. It makes me imagine that there’s some unsolved murder haunting the place, or a buried treasure somewhere on the island with half-destroyed clues still visible on the crumbling mantelpieces or sneakily encoded in the geometry of the rooms!

The basement was especially spooky. And, the inspiration for the halls or Erebor, no doubt.

Kerry also found a “Carry” car. Cute!

Kayaking victory!

After that, we headed for the mainland, and the spot where we launched. Then we spent the rest of the day lounging around in the pool, napping, and eating more food, trying to shake off the rest of the jet lag and prepare for our first bicycle ride.

Onward!