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Alfie Burns Kris Avery Luke Saunders Whatipu
Part of the article West, east and southwest of Auckland
Oh I do believe
If you don’t like things you leave
For some place you never gone before
Pa papa papa papa
Pa papa papa papa
Pa papa papa papa
Pa papa papa papa
With two nights back in Auckland we set about the new plan: get a vehicle we could squeeze five people and five bikes into. The owner of the hostel introduced us to local wheeler-dealer Michael. He had three cars to choose from so we bought the one he seemed least keen to get rid of (“aw no, you don’t wanna be a Mitsi’ driver do you?”). We left Auckland behind the wheel of a Legnum (“cheers big ears, you’re now the owner of a car in New Zealand!”) with the advice to “get yourselves down to the South Island” as soon as possible, presumably to be far, far away from him when the wheels fell off the thing.
On day one with the car we saw more than we had in the previous two weeks combined. It felt like, for perhaps the fourth time, that the trip had begun, and, for the first time, as we zig-zagged from coast to coast that our expectations about this country were being met. On bikes we would not have seen these places. They were too far off the direct north-south route, down too many gravel roads and up too many hills. New Zealand is maybe the worst country we could have chosen for our first cycle touring adventure. A trip somewhere familiar made new by the journey would have been better.
The freedom of cycle touring, buying nothing but food, owning nothing you can’t fix yourself, is still appealing. But money can buy freedom just as it can buy another way to tie yourself down. These days I try—as with the car—to spend it more in the former way than the latter.
* * *
Alfie decided to leave the trip at this point, for various reasons.
As the sun set over Raglan Harbour a coach and a flight were conjured from a mobile phone, library wifi and a credit card. A bike box was scavenged the next morning and we dropped him off in the afternoon. Then a 9am flight, layed over in Sydney, arriving in Heathrow 30 hours later and 13 hours behind. Departures are always mottled with an irrelevancy of details: Tickets and timings, the ephemera of leaving, memorised for a moment in moments unremembered.
I don’t know how Alfie felt in those hours in between, but I hope sincerely that whatever he left in the UK means that much more for having gone back to it, as much as the freedom to exist anywhere means to me.
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