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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I spent the days between the 27th–30th October in limbo, in the space between countries, in between space and the earth. The only familiar things on the other side were the box with my bike, a modestly-sized rucksack and the four other people I was with. But at the same time, pedalling away from the airport on a just-reassembled bike, there was a familiarity to being in a new place, knowing little and having much to discover.
By the time we'd got to the city two of the five pannier racks had snapped and a third was threatening to. So a fair proportion of the three days in Auckland were spent sourcing and modifying replacements and ditching anything that could make our setups less overloaded.
With our two nights in the hostel up we were stuck with nowhere to stay, so at 6pm the trip began. From the city we took the ferry to the north shore of Auckland then rode into the suburban night until we found a patch of woodland dense enough to conceal our first night’s camp.
The next morning we rode on to Albany coach station. Three hours on a coach took us to Kerikeri, as far north as regular services go. The next morning we turned around and began pedalling south.
After 200km of riding around Auckland, away from Auckland and then back towards Auckland everyone was fed up. The hills and the rain made it physically tough. We were sticking to the main highway, buffeted by logging trucks in the day and camping among the same trees each night in an effort to get to the next place faster, without it being somewhere we were looking forward to seeing. I was taking few photos, in contrast to all the photos of amazing places that we’d browsed in the months leading up to the trip.
We each wanted to be doing something else. We each came to the realisation that the other four felt the same while taking respite from the rain in a holiday park in Whangerei. With consensus reached it did not take long to decide what the something else should be. The next day we got onto the coach heading back to Auckland to start afresh.
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Portraits, Paris Charles de Gaulle airport; bike setups, Auckland Airport.
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