Forest roads

There’s a hell of a lot of trees in this part of New Zealand and there’s a beautiful maze of roads running through all of them. The only problem is that they’re almost all private, something that I was not aware of and seemingly Google isn’t either.

This made me ride a pretty random route down to Taupo as I tried to figure out how to get there without spending my entire time on route one. Google was not particularly helpful, making up roads where there weren’t any, trying to get me to ride through mills and farms and just generally suggesting stupid alternatives.

The dotted lines were sections where either I was told to turn around because I was trespassing or simply didn’t exist. After some laughs from a few locals and a little advice I managed to work something out and actually it a relatively nice ride when not on the main road. The thing that impressed me most was the size of the forests and forestry going on. It was quite unbelievable. Although given I have now found out that forestry accounts for 3.2% of New Zealand’s economy and forests cover 38% of the land mass, it shouldn’t have been surprising. Good news though, permits for private forestry are only given if they can prove it’s fully sustainable!

After making my way through the forest the view opened up and getting to Taupo the weather was looking good, so I made a call and this turned up:

And shortly I was 15,000 ft up in the air hurtling towards the ground at 200km/h. I’d forgotten how incredible sky diving was and absolutely loved the 60s of freefall.