Wednesday, January 17, 2007

New Zealand

Nina, me, my dad and his girlfriend Pat all just spent the last week driving around the south island of New Zealand.

Wow.

Never before in my life have I seen such dramatic natural beauty. It is impossible to convey the scenery in words as it is on such a dramatic scale. Not even photos do it justice. It was simply breathtaking. Our neighbour in Melbourne is a Kiwi and he has a favorite quote regarding his home: "When God created the earth he had lots of pieces left over and he made New Zealand out of them."

The land is as diverse as it is glorious. Untouched mountains and rivers, valleys and forests, beaches and meadows, and clean, safe, vibrant cities. No guns, terrorism, or desperate poverty. It is a sane, safe, and beautiful land.

Nina and I did a boogie-boarding excursion down the Kawarau River (where the Fellowship of the Ring rode their boats past the huge stone Pillars of the Kings. It was like whitewater rafting but holding onto a three-foot board instead of being in a boat. It was awesome. There were whirlpools, and at one point Nina got sucked down into one and shot up a few seconds later.

We walked within meters of the Fox Glacier, went kayaking through the Milford Sound fiords, stood in valleys where wildflowers bloomed and the mountains filled the backdrop, sat on the shore of Lake Tekapo where microscopic debris from glaciers make it nearly glow blue, drank crystal clear water from streams that wound their way down from the mountains, and the list goes on.

We fell in love with the place and wondered why anyone would leave it.

Instead of trying to convey in words any further, I am including some images from our holiday. These give an idea but it is a land that simply needs to be seen to be believed. Click to get bigger versions.
Us at Queenstown

Valley Near Queenstown

Golf Course in Queenstown

Nina at Fox Glacier

Fox Glacier (note tiny people)

Closeup of Glacier

Glacier Stream

Lupins (wildflowers) in Mountain Valley

Lupins and Mountain Stream

Nina and Bridge

The Chasm

Mountain Meadow

Amazing Field

Lake Tekapo

Lupins and Lake Tekapo

Lake Tekapo Shoreline

Milford Sound
(cliff face rising to the right of the center one is over five miles away.)

The Great Victorian Bike Ride: Day Nine


Yea to Whittlesea 36 miles (333 miles total)

Needless to say we woke this morning excited and ready to go. The big final push to the end!

Our plan is to arrive at noon so we will be leaving in reverse order of speed. Our slowest guys will go first up to our quickest leaving at the end. We will have one rider leave early and find a spot a few miles from the finish line to gather us all up so we can arrive together.

It is a short day and an easy ride so we end up at the check point around 11am. We all arrive, one by one, and after a few photos, we leave, riding side by side, for the final few miles.

I was getting a real rush the closer we got to the finish and when we finally saw the huge finish line archway, I got such a rush of accomplishment. I remember thinking, "Wow. I did it!" I think the feeling was all around, and when we heard our school being announced, we all sprinted to the finish. Me with a huge dopey grin on my face.

Done. The Great Victorian Bike Ride 2006 is over.

Nina was there waiting for me and it was wonderful to give her a big kiss and hug. The kids' parents all showed up one after another and we told them all how well their boys did. I was particularily proud of the kids who weren't cool and very athletic. They persevered and pushed themselves to get through a tough ride. They did awesome. They all did.

After saying our goodbyes, Nina and I headed to our car, loaded up my gear from the piles on the grass, and headed home for the steak lunch I had waiting for me.

Total Miles: 333 Total kilometers: 536

As a footnote, shortly after we finished the ride, the exact area we rode through burst into the worst bushfires in over two hundred years. Two months later they are still burning. It is a hard life during the summer out there in the country towns around Victoria, and hopefully the drought soon ends and the farmers get a reprieve with some long-needed rain.

It was beautiful seeing the country the way we did but it would be impossible to not marvel at how harsh Australia can be. There are times when it feels like the land is doing its best to keep people from living on it.


The Great Victorian Bike Ride: Day Eight


Mansfield to Yea 50 miles (297 miles total)

We left a little bit later as the weather was cool and going to stay that way for the rest of the ride. We have worked our way a bit south of the heat, so the only other thing we need to worry about was the wind.

We treated ourselves to a nice breakfast in town before we got moving.

Then it hit us. Holy shit. We had a HUGE head wind the entire way today. We rode past the lake in Bonnie Doon, where the family from the movie went on holiday and boating, and it was nothing more than a damp patch of grass at the bottom of a tiny valley.

We actually had to pedal going downhill as the wind was so strong. This ended up being the single toughest day of the ride, and for the last 15 miles, Ed, Jane and I took turns drafting just to take the worst of the wind off us for periods of time.

When we finally ended up in Yea, we headed straight for the pub and drank several pitchers of lemon squach and bitters and watched more of the cricket. The town had the common sense to close the main street to traffic and we bikers ran the roost for the day. We had a lovely time and we advised the boys that they should be in camp around 10pm so they could get a good sleep for the last ride. Of course we knew that, with all the girls riding around as well, this might not happen. We were okay with that.

At one point, Ed and I were walking down main street and we happened to run across a few of our boys chatting up some girls. I made eye contact with one in particular and played the part of the good dad, talking out loud about what a nice group of boys we had and kept on walking. Ed, of course, stopped and gave them a little shit. I, likewise, had to stick my beak into the fun and let them know we wanted them to be safe.

Earlier that night the group of girls at the sight next to ours had a major briefing where the teachers told them that they wanted them up at 5am, and wanted them to set new records for being early, and we all sat around rolling our eyes. Ed, taking this as a perfect opportunity to have a go at private school bullshit, jokingly gave our boys a pep talk about how no one is allowed to get drunk again, start any fights in the pubs, and should be back in their tents by no later than 2am. The girls thought he was serious and we were given a few stink eyes from the teachers.

Mission accomplished.





By the time I was in the tent, I was dreaming of seeing Nina again and getting a big hug and a kiss. Our bed, toilet, and shower...ahhh the comforts of home.

One more day.

The Great Victorian Bike Ride: Day Seven


Whitfield to Mansfield 39 miles (247 miles total)

Absolute mother of a mountain. Effectively it was an eighteen mile climb up a mountain. About five minutes up the mountain I passed the last of the students who was having a hard go. I took one rest stop on the climb up, but didn't get off the bike other than that before lunch. It was going to get hot again and I didn't want to end up stuck in the heat in the afternoon.


We stopped at lunch early in a nice shady spot and were met with a pleasant surprise. Throughout the ride there has been a four-person band that has entertained the riders in varius guises: gypsies, minstrals, etc. Today there were at the lunch spot done up as hillbillies and they played some really cool bluegrass and country music. We grabbed some shade and ended up at the lunch spot for about two hours. It's getting easier to keep in mind that this isn't a race but a ride, and we weren't in a hurry to leave this little oasis.

We had some nice downhill riding after lunch and then we were hit with an utterly depressing last eight miles.


It had become stinking hot and the land was parched. Australia is going through its worst drought in hundreds of years and the area where we were riding is in the heart of bushfire country. Rivers and lakes have dried up to the point that they were either gone altogether or just a small, desperate trickle in a barren landscape. This felt like a dead land. Outside of the riders, silently spread along the road, and the few gums, there didn't seem to be much life here at all. I drank about seven liters of water today and was really looking forward to getting to the site.

Fortunately we were at a camp sight that had lots of shade, even if our tents were in the open sun. We spent the day hanging out and the feeling that I was ready to go home started to get more pronounced. I was ready. Just two more dayes of riding.

Dinner was braised chicken, mashed potatoes and vegetables. Very nice and no line.

After dinner I went down by myself and watched The Castle, a classic Aussie comedy, on an outdoor screen at the camp sight. After it finished I crawled into bed.

The weather is supposed to break tonight and it should be cooler tomorrow.


The Great Victorian Bike Ride: Day Six


Myrtleford to Whitfield 53 miles (208 miles total)

We awoke to overcast skies and 10 degrees. Pure Bliss!

On our rest day (yesterday-Day Five) we were joined by another collegue, Jane, who is to ride with us for the second half. She was nervous arriving with her husband as she thought it was going to be an iron-man triathalon type of thing. I assured her that if I, and some of our less than fit boys can grunt through this, sh was going to have no problem.

Anyway, we got up and started the ride casually and I enjoyed having someone new to chat to duing the riding. After only a couple hours we stopped at Brown Brothers Winery (a great marketing deal was struck, thank god) and had some lunch and wonderful coffees. Naturally I had to pick up some wine, and since my dad was arriving in a couple weeks, I decided to buy a number of his favorite bottles, whhich were shipped free for us nut jobs in lycra.


We continued on what was to be the easiest day of the ride. We cruised for the rest of the day and ended up stopping short of Whitfield at another winery. We pulled up and sat outside, eating antipasto, drinking local beers, and taking in the beautiful sight of the vineyard. It was bliss, except for the GODDAMN FLIES. The last few summers have been particularily nasty for flies. This is unlike anything I have experienced before. If you are to remain relatively motionless, you will be surrounded with dozens of the little bastards and they will become even more voracious should you dare enjoy eating outdoors. I tried to find a zen space within myself and ignore them, but I was flooded with images of napalming them all off the face of earth. I guess when the wind blows from the north, where the cattle and sheep stations are in the driers areas, the flies are blown in as well. It is a joy.


We got to camp and the clouds broke. The sun beat down yet again. Went swimming in lake.

We saddled up to dinner, which was a lovely beef and rissotto-thingy. But let me paint a picture for you. As Ed and I sat opposite one another in the huge meal tent, sweating, we had to keep one hand constatly waving furiously back and forth over our food as any lull would bring the hundreds of flies hovering about our faces to touchdown on our dinners. I finally sacrificed my desert brownie with candied cherries and slapped it down on the table ext to my plate. The brownie was actually hard to see under the shroud of flies that swarmed over it. We looked at each other...

"I'm over this," I said.
"What, the ride?"
"No. The flies."
"Don't look up then."

Of couse I did, and saw that at the highest point of the tent the dim light faded to black under a canopy of thousands of the little bastards.

"At least they're not on me."

When we finished, the three of us decided to catch "Walk the Line", which was playing at a local winery. We strolled over to find a beautiful, fly-free vineyard, a huge inflatable screen, beautiful gums silhouetted against the setting sun and unlimited glasses of wine. Decadence. The highlight for me though, was the toilet. (The toilets on the camp were semi-trailer rigs with the collection area underneath. They were filthy, stunk, small, and designed to be nothing more than the most practical way to legally releive you of your waste. And they got worse with every passing day.) Sitting on a proper toilet. Alone. Clean. Fresh. This was paradise.

We watched the film, enjoying it thoroughly, and then walked back to our spartan, sprawling campground.

Tomorrow is actually supposed to be the hardest day of the ride as it has a mother of a ride over a mountain pase, but then the bastard just keeps going up and up. No rewarding downhill ride until the very end.

I went to sleep feeling pretty good about my chances of making it.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

The Great Victorian Bike Ride: Day Four



Mount Beauty to Myrtleford 39 miles (155 miles total).



Here's the morning that thousands of us bikers have been thinking about. Dreading, actually. The testicle/bum destroying climb up Mount Beauty first thing in the morning. Each day's ride is charted on a Route Profile that each rider was given weeks before the ride. It shows a graph of the distance and altitude and today's was a spike rising 800 meters in 9 kilometers. We were literally biking up the side of a mountain. At least I wasn't, for whatever reason, worse for wear after our encounter with Jock.

A kilometer from camp the road took an aggressive uphill posture and I peddled along at a respectable 8 miles and hour, passing people...slowly.

After about forty five minutes of trudging, I pulled over for a break and Ed was already ahead of me, sitting in the shade. Our kids were all working their way up the mountain.



Near the top we saw one of our students walking his bike up. He had broken the neck of his seat. He had to get the Sag Wagon down the mountain to camp as there were no replacement parts to be found.

As we reached the top the volunteers were playing Chariots of Fire on a little boom box and we had a good rest and water break. It took us over an hour to get to the top.

I struck a pose...


...and then we tore ass down the hill.

The ride for the rest of the day was nice and easy. I stopped along the way at a drink stand called Juice Pig and got a bottle of watermelon juice.

When I pulled up in Myrtleford (which is where we are to spend the rest day tomorrow) I was surprised that it was such a small little town. They must have put in a good bid to have the riders spend their rest day there.

We attended our first teachers' briefing and found out that 40 people had to take the Sag up the hill and there were a few crashes as people smashed into each other flying down the hill.

Ed and I made sure all the boys were accounted for and then took the air-conditioned bus to the town center for beers at the local pub, The Buffalo. We sat back, drinking icy beer and eating hot chips, all the while being entertained by two 20-something girls hustling the locals. They said they were on the ride but we never saw them, and they were throwing their boobs around like presents at Christmas. It was a wonderfully shameless display and the local gentry were vying for pole position. We quietly drank our beers and left, never to see the girls again on the ride.

Went to bed that night thinking that the hill wasn't as bad as I thought it'd be. I'm starting to feel more in shape. Tomorrow we get to sleep in.

Half way through the ride...