Big news – we cycled for a net elevation gain today! That means no more rolling hills. We started this morning, after a day of resting, at 170m. We ended up, after 40km, at 820m for a net gain of 650m. Most of the day was gradual uphill which wasn’t too difficult at all. There was one giant monster of a hill right near the end of the day near a town called Raurimu. Raurimu is famous for its spiral railroad track designed to overcome really steep hills & get trains from the valley to the plateau above. Too bad we couldn’t cycle along the railroad spiral…instead we had to make it up the long, steep grade. Yikes! We sat on the porch of a deserted ski chalet and ate a sandwich in preparation for the climb. Jamie gave a pep talk, the major gist of which is “Do not give up or you will be totally screwed, there is no way we can push our bikes up this hill!” I thought about trying to hitch-hike to the top but didn’t really want to face the humiliation of admitting to that on this website. So, as you might guess, we made it! We were even cheered along by friendly beeps from passing cars. At the top we were greeted with beautiful views of Mt. Ruapehu – a gigantic snow covered volcano on the horizon. Here’s me with the mountain in the background. You can’t really see it, but it was pretty in real life:

We’re currently right outside Tongariro National Park which is host to one of the most famous day hikes in New Zealand – Tongariro Crossing. For now we’re planning to skip the hike for two reasons:

1. It is really cloudy, rainy, and in general bad hiking weather. We’d miss all the views. It’s not raining hard enough to make biking miserable yet, though (knock on wood).
2. We want to haul ass to Wellington so we can take the ferry to the South Island. We’re planning to come back and see sights on the North Island only if we have time after we’re done in the South.

We’ve left the nice back roads and are back on the highway for now, but it hasn’t been horrible so far. I think we’re far enough out of Auckland to be rid of the major traffic hassles. Every once in awhile we run into a bridge where the shoulder disappears, which is bad news for us because we spend our days riding on the shoulder. At these bridges our method is to slow down, look behind us for giant trucks, and dart across when the coast is clear.

Other news for the day: we ate an entire package of cheese & and entire package of cookies today. We were also on track to finish an entire loaf of bread today, but decided to save it for breakfast. We’re both really hungry all the time, which is fun!

Hanging out in the tent:

Campsite had a flock of chickens. Jamie liked this one best:

Sarah carefully studying the elevation maps in our cycling guidebook. I spend a lot of time doing this:

Jamie tallying the daily stats:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 4:17 am and is filed under New Zealand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.