Pete Hepworth - Possums and Punctures (Improper Cycling In New Zealand)

Possums andPunctures: Improper Cycling Around New Zealand

By PeteHepworth

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Pete Hepworth 2010

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Acknowledgements

Huge thanksare due to: Lorna for putting the idea in my head in the firstplace; Walking New Zealand for publishing my tales from Tongariro; Andrea forpointing out my fondness for what I thought were the small andinoffensive words and , but and that ; and[sorry Andrea, another one snuck in] especially to Jan for sievingout most of the rubbish and for climbing some ridiculously enormoushills when she could have been in Fiji.

Contents

I had finally become too fat towear my dads pants.

When I visited my parents theother Christmas I was running short of clean clothes so my mumsuggested that I borrow some of my dads. One glance at my dadstrousers was enough to convince me that they werent going to fit.Despite the fact that he is retired, he is slimmer than I am and hestays this way by cycling.

What to do? I could have joineda gym. I could have wrapped myself in cling film and run up anddown One Tree Hill. I could simply have dieted. Understandably noneof these appealed. It was time to see a bit more of my adoptedhome: New Zealand. It was time to take a leaf out of my dads book.It was time to get the bike out.

You can see more of the worldfrom a bike; you can get closer to people you would never have metbefore. You feel more inclined to stop to see things that wouldonly have been a smear on your memory had you been travelling in acar.

My younger brother learnt tocycle before I did. I pretended that I didnt want to or that Icouldnt be bothered; however, watching Adis rather unorthodoxattempts to defy gravity made me jealous for the freedom offered bythis machine. My brother could only learn to cycle on one day ofthe week: bin day. He hopped on, pointed downhill and pushed offdown the road bashing into metal dustbins to arrest his downwardprogress; brakes were not worthy of his attention. To me, the wholeidea of cycling just didnt make any sense.

So, you wantme to climb on this thing (without stabilisers) and just sort ofpush off yeah? Well, the thing is and this might seem like astupid question wont I fall sideways ?

So, rather inthe manner of Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes fame whose bike attacks him, if he goes anywherenear it I cautiously approached the bike. It didnt bite, snarlor run me over. It wasnt nearly as difficult as I imagined andIve cycled ever since, but never for lengthy periods of time. Thistrip was going to be more challenging.

I couldntshake the feeling that it was all going to be uphill. North alwayslooks up on a map.We generally refer to it as up . Things felt better albeit moregeographically confused after rotating the map 180 degrees. Iimagined that I could freewheel the whole way downhill now. Mydestination was Cape Reinga, which is located at the end of thetapering piece of land that points into the emptiness of thePacific and as far north as I could go without the aid of scubagear.

I told my girlfriend Jan myplan and in a moment of idiocy she decided to join me. Both beingteachers we waited for the next in a long line of holidays and setoff. Avoiding the heavy Auckland traffic we drove up to Matakoheand parked our camper van behind a bush.

Anyone who knows Jan and Iwouldnt be surprised to hear that on the first day we didnt getourselves moving until almost two in the afternoon. It wasnt somuch that we faffed, more that circumstances prevailed against usto ensure a late departure time.

We packed ourpanniers full of a tent, cooker, gas, pots and pans, warm clothes,rain gear and plenty of snacks. Padded cycling gloves were pulledon and helmets donned. We remembered to tie up any flapping ties onour panniers to prevent us from suffering the same fate as manymembers of The Archers cast: being dragged into passing combineharvesters or thresher machines. The very last piece ofpreparation was the sacred art of Application of the Vaseline to preventchafing in our nether regions, strictly adhering to our friendLornas no double-dipping rule.

We were fullof hope for the new day. About ten metres down the track there wasa faint pop signifying the bursting of both our hope and of Jans reartyre. We up-ended her bike next to the white picket fence of thechurchyard and set to work. We divvied up the responsibilities: Ispread bike parts, pumps, spare inner tubes, green, plastic objectsfor wedging the tyre off with, glue and sandpaper liberally acrossthe path, while Jan ordered take-away coffee. Then, having fixedthe offending inner tube, we discovered that our gentle tinkering(and bashing and swearing) had buggered up her gears.

Clunk. Rrrrr.

By this stage it was earlyafternoon; we were totally fed up and all of those kilometres thatlay ahead of us weighed heavily on our minds. We almost headed backto the camper van to sleep on these problems, but instead we had aquick sense of humour failure each before finally setting offnorthwards to Dargaville. Every so often coincidentally abouthalfway up a hill on each occasion we stopped to fiddle with thegears, desperately trying to remember what we knew about bikemaintenance. I dont know much about bikes. Ive always assumedthat the round ends face downwards and much beyond that is a littlehazy. The pair of us trying to fix the gears was like sawing a bitoff a table leg to stop it from wobbling and eventually reducingthe whole thing to ground level. By the time wed finished the bikehad gone from having the minor inconvenience of not quite slippingsmoothly enough onto the biggest front cog, to the serious handicapof being restricted to about three gears in the middle of itsrange.

Clunk. Rrrrr. Clunkityclunk.

After a few gentle,introductory hills we rounded a corner to spy the plains headingoff into the distance towards our destination. The onlyinterruption to the level skyline and the patchwork of fields wasan odd-looking, knobbly hill to the east of our route. Carefulplanning had provided a first day of downs followed by flats.Speaking of which, shortly after swooping down a hill past a hugegrain silo, Jan developed another one. We both developed anotherSense of Humour Failure (which will, from now on, be referred to asSOHF in the interests of economy of space). It didnt take long tofix the problem but these delays were starting to eat into thedaylight and we started to wonder if we were going to make it toDargaville that day at all.