Well I used to play rugby, and Kiwi’s are quite good at the sport, reigning world champions. New Zealand hosted the Rugby World Cup in 2011 and a lot of my teammates made the journey, halfway around the world, to attend some of the matches and check the place out. I had just bought my house in Baltimore and did not have the funds to join them. So for the next couple of years I kept hearing about how awesome of a place it is and I really wanted to go. I planned to save up a ton of vacation and make it a spectacular trip since traveling this far requires more than a mere two weeks. I was going to WOOF, hitchhike, maybe camp, do some touristy stuff with the Kiwi Experience tour bus, who knows.
My friend, Sam, realized he would be in between jobs at the time so he decided to join me. He made the recommendation of getting motorcycles and riding all over the islands and that sounded like the best possible method of travel. I had just began riding and loved the idea so we got to planning the trip. We soon found that renting motorcycles would be way too expensive so we searched for used bikes to buy and then sell when we returned home. I tracked flight prices and read up on “must-see” locations. During one planning session, my roommate, Nick, popped in and realized that he would regret it for the rest of his life if he did not join us on this adventure. At this point, we were leaving in two weeks so he had to pull some strings to get the time off from work. Around the same time, my brother, Brian, and his girlfriend, Ann, decided to come along and make it a party. He was busy finishing his PhD thesis and didn’t have much time to plan but he and Ann would rent a car and meet us motorbiker’s every few days.
Planning stage.
We kept our itinerary as open as possible; fly in on December 10th, take the ferry to the North island on December 28th, attend a NYE music festival on the 30th-1st, and then fly home on January 15th. That was all we had on the books and we would wing it for everything else. Sam and I were heading out first and had a few days on our own before we would meet Nick, Brian, and Ann in Queenstown. We were packing a ton of weight between clothes, camping gear, motorcycle tools, helmets, jackets, camera gear, and food. Years later, as a seasoned thru-hiker, I can look back and have some laughs about just how much stuff I took!
My life for the next five weeks!
After a long 30 hours of traveling (connecting flight through LAX, then to Auckland, and finally a quick hop down to Christchurch) we arrived at our destination. Matt, a local who was selling a motorbike to Sam, picked us up from the airport and let us crash at his house with his family for a couple days as we got settled, sorted gear, and he even took us on one of his favorite off-road rides. He was the first instance of fantastic generosity that we encountered throughout the entire trip. Imagine if you were selling your car on Craigslist and two foreigners replied, would you sell it to them? Would you pick them up from the airport? Invite them to stay with you and your family for a few days?
Anyway, we lost most of the footage from our first ride. I felt like I was in over my head. Riding on paved roads is one thing, but dropping into a riverbed with baseball to football sized rocks is a whole other story. I eventually got my bike under control as we enjoyed riding up into the nearby mountainous farmland. We rode with a herd of cattle running down the road, biked across some shallow rivers, snaked around the edges of shear cliffs, fixed a flat tire, and Matt accidentally ran over a chicken. My mind was overloaded with fun. If the next five weeks were going to be this wild I wasn’t sure if I’d make it back home. Or if I’d even want to go back.
Sam taking selfies while riding. Safety first!
Dropping into a river bed.