My Account
Andrew Peddie. Around half the trail was off road. Snacks left out for riders by “trail angels”.
Andrew Peddie of Manly looks back on the mountain bike ride that took him from Cape Reinga to Bluff in 184 hours as a physical, mental and spiritual journey.
It also put him, and around 1000 other riders who took on this year’s Tour Aotearoa Brevet, in a unique, “Covid-free bubble”.
The Tour Aotearoa route was designed by Jonathan Kennett to highlight the best New Zealand Cycle Trail Great Rides, Heartland Rides, and quiet back country roads.
A Tour Aotearoa Brevet event has been organised every two years since 2016. The event sees waves of 100 people per day depart from Cape Reinga from mid-February to early March. Riders wear GPS trackers and are supposed to take no more than 30 days to finish in Bluff.
When Andrew was dropped off at Cape Reinga, early in February, Covid-19 was a term no one had heard. By the time he flew back from Invercargill, 28 days later, no one was talking of anything else. Staying in campgrounds and hostels, often with no internet access, Andrew and the people he rode with, were unaware of the scale and speed of what was happening with the virus. Eventually, around 200 had to pull out early to get home. Andrew was among the last to complete the Brevet and only just got back to the Coast before the lockdown.
The 57-year-old teacher aide doesn’t like talking about the numbers but, for the record, the ride is 3045km, and rarely traverses a highway. Riders are only on roads about half the time and most are secondary roads. The rest is made up of shingle and single track.
Andrew averaged 110-120km every day, over 7-9 hours; he says sometimes just getting on the bike every morning was the hardest part.
“On the first day I was riding into a 30 knot headwind, flying sand and heat on 90 Mile Beach and I was thinking I didn’t know if I could do it,” Andrew says. “Then you realise you just have to make the wheels go round. And see purpose in making the wheels go round.”
Although he started as a solo rider, Andrew found a community among the other riders, and ended up riding with one of them, Christian, from Day 4 onwards.
Then there were the people in local communities who went out of their way to welcome the cyclists – including “trail angels”.
“People would put out chocolates, and a young family rode beside us north of Dargaville and gave us watermelons. One woman in Reefton hangs a bucket of lollies and 2 Minute noodles in a tree with a sign saying “if it’s empty, give me a bell for a refill”. It was lovely to go through towns and cities and people would wave and beep their horns. Family and friends had us to stay and there were messages of support via the trackers from people following our progress.”
One of the challenges was organising food and somewhere to stay each night.
Accommodation ranged from a little 1940s B & B in Bluff, where they were the only guests, to crowded hostels. Andrew spent 15 nights under canvas including in the sand dunes on 90 Mile Beach. One night he put up his tent in an arena that earlier in the day hosted a test match between Australia and NZ’s senior woodchoppers.
“We got frosted on in the middle of the North Island and stayed in a B & B in Whanganui that had once been a Victorian hospital – they supplied toweling dressing gowns and slippers.”
It was a unique way to experience the country – riding through the backcountry, up Rimutaka Incline on a hot day, or weaving through Wellington’s rush hour traffic in the rain to catch the ferry.
Sometimes memorable things came from simply seeking a shady spot to rest.
“I remember sitting in the shade of a traffic control box at a roundabout with two others in 30-degree heat while the traffic roared around us – we were in our own little world. And under a shady tree in Northland, near a farm reservoir, I watched swallows hunting on the lake. Another time, we went across a big valley before Haast and there were huge mountains and streams but a dragonfly flew alongside, at my shoulder, for a while and that’s the moment I remember – the fragile dragonfly against the huge landscape.”
“The thing about riding is that you arrive slowly – places unfold, whereas in a car, they just appear. I was continuously astounded that we got to all those places on bikes.”
Andrew hopes to do more bike-packing, and says anyone can do it.
“The youngest on the Tour was 12, on a tandem with his dad, and the oldest was 79. This ride enables ordinary people to do something extraordinary.”
