View of Mount Taranaki (Egmont) from Stratford saddle.
December 2 New Plymouth - Stratford New Zealand 45 km
We are finally off today for Stratford, we have been off the bikes for three months and I know I am going to feel like a newbie on the bike. The bike will wobble and it will take a kilometer or two to get the feel of it again. The weather is finally nice, in the low 20s centigrade that is and a light breeze. We do not expect to have internet for at least a week while we ride up the lost highway towards Taumarunui.
The climb up to Stratford was gradual but consistent. We stopped in Inglewood to pick up a few supplies and we talked about where we were going to spend the night, either a roadside picnic area or Stratford. We thought we would stay in the picnic area for the night so I picked up a few supplies. Not a kilometer out of Inglewood I hear a thud thud thud sound and yelled up to Tim Hey your rear wheel is making a funny sound and Boom! flat tire, The sidewall of Tim’s rear tire had blown out. It was a relatively new tire with about 6,000 km so the flat was unexpected. I should have know better because it seems the beginning of many of our journeys start with a flat. The first day we left Arizona, out of Bangkok, out of Canberra, I am sure I am missing a few. So we put a boot in the tire and road into Stratford and booked into the motor camp.
December 3 - Stratford - Pohokura 45 km.
We had a bit of chores to do in the morning, a stop at the post, grocery shopping and the bike shop to pick up a new tire. We are now off on the Forgotten World Highway, a highway that was built in the late 1800s and promises to be hilly. It was a nice downhill coast through farmland until Douglas and then up to Stratford saddle where we had a great view of Mount Egmont also know as Mt. Taranaki. We were in search of a Department of Conservation campground for the night but we never did find it, no problem, there were plenty of places to camp. We passed a lodge/campground at Te Wera but decided to push on and camped in a nice flat spot not too far from the railroad tracks before Pohokura Saddle. When the train went by the ground shook like a bowl of Jell-O. We changed Tim’s tire, I doubt if it would have lasted another day. The scenery has been stunning green pasture land and high ridges, we are riding between volcanoes and the terrain is dominated by ash flows, young topography makes for short steep hills. At the end of the day I was pretty beat and I think I was in bed before the sun went down.
December 4 Pohokura - Tangaruka Gorge Picnic area 48 kmIt feels good to be back on the road again, but I have to say the first week is full of body aches. We are taking it slow but whoa I am sore all over, this will all disappear soon. The road continued up and down and we pedaled up the Whangamomona saddle and had lunch in town, the only hotel, restaurant and motor camp along this road, there is no grocery store so I was glad I had all our supplies. The town is a cute early 1900’s buildings and as we ate lunch a herd of sheep, a very large herd to me anyway, came through town. There really are more sheep here than people. After lunch we rode through Tangaruka gorge and to our campsite for the night. The scenery changed from farm land to the gorge where the ferns took the place of trees, just gorgeous. We camped in a nice spot and watched the logging trucks go by, some how we managed to be off the road every time one of those truck came by. The gravel road started about 10 km after Tahora and lasted for 16 km, not bad at all.
December 5 Tangaruka Gorge Picnic area - Taumarunui Holiday Park 64 kmWe have been using the Pedals Paradise book and it has a nice profile of this road and by the looks of the profile we have a lot of climbing to do before we got into town. The morning was a bit cloudy but not too bad, we met a couple from Britain, Mike and Alice, and talked with them for about an hour or so and Alice mentioned the gravel road ended in 6 kilometers and to my delight it did, the dirt road wasn’t too bad but it did slow us down a bit and I was itching to get to town, find a camp site and take a hot shower. We had plenty of hills to climb first, as the day wore on the weather changed from cloudy and humid to rainy, we took shelter under a overhang at Te Whakarea. Tim wanted to free camp for the night and I wanted a motor camp, when it started to rain Tim realized we probably would get stuck out of town in the rain so we pushed on into Taumarunui and picked up groceries and rode out to the Holiday park. A nice little place to camp along the Whanganui river.
December 6
It rained all night and we were cozy in our new Big Agnes tent, sleeping bags and pads. We are gear testers and we are testing a new tent. It is light weight and easy to carry.It seems that a tropical front from the northwest is about to collide with a cold front from the southeast, it is pouring down rain at the moment and I am glad we are inside.
Read all of Cindie’s North Island New Zealand Journal Here See index of all (several years) Cindie’s Journals here
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