The best of both

Today had the best of both, some pristine road cycling and some stunning trails. It was also a relatively short ride, which I really didn’t mind at all.

I had originally planned on getting to Mangakino today but after finding out the accommodation I had planned to stay at was closed due to flooding and everywhere else being full I decided I needed alternative plans.

I still did the majority of the route I wanted to do, at least for the first half, but then I made a beeline for a town called Tokoroa east of Mangakino. The 20 odd kilometres of trail today were unbelievable. It followed the edges of Lake Karapiro, meandering through undergrowth, heading up and down hills where the edges of the lake were too steep and even had an elevated section through some beautiful wetlands.

I’m now starting to grow in confidence in both mine and my bikes ability to handle off road sections, which comes with both some positives and some negatives. The positives are that I can go quicker and it’s mostly a lot more enjoyable. The less so good aspects are that I almost stacked it down the bank and into the lake as I negotiated a few corners, I lost my pannier entirely when getting some “air” taking my bike over some sweet “jumps”, and I’ve come off a couple of times trying to gas it up some gravely steep hills. Speaking of which I have yet to be defeated on the road by a hill but I walked a section of gravel trail today called “the hill”… I didn’t even get close.

One thing I’ve noticed after several days on the bike is that road sings, house names and road names all have useful subtext to them. For example this:

This doesn’t actually mean be wary of concealed entrances, it means you’re about to head up a big bloody hill. Also the sign telling you there is a steep gradient coming up sneakily never tells you which way it’s going and sometime an uphill is show as ascending left to right and sometimes descending, so it’s all a bit confusing. But today’s lesson was that you should always seek out roads called “Old [insert town name] Road”. Old Taupo Road was epic. Perfectly smooth and in the two hours or so I spent on it I can’t have seen more than 20 cars.

I also got to see some pretty chilled out looking animals along the way, which gave me a good excuse to get off the bike for a couple of minutes before hopping back on.

I was done by 1:30 so stuffed my face with a burger and planned my next move given that my prior plans are entirely out of the window due to the aforementioned unforeseen complications. So I’m off to Taupo and going to spend some time off the bike hopefully doing some cool stuff. This does mean I’m going totally off the route provided by the Tour Aotearoa and given I want to avoid the main highway, I’m taking some pretty random forest roads tomorrow to get to Taupo. Should make for a somewhat bumpy but lovely ride!