Camping down the Timber Trail
Te Kūiti to Taumarunui, 14th - 18th January
My decision to leave India and go to New Zealand was all about spending more time in nature and camping, and I definitely got that in my first few days of riding in New Zealand. After landing in Auckland, I started cycling from the small town of Te Kuiti and took the scenic Timber Trail for two days, ending up at the village of Ongarue. Along the way, I met some locals, did plenty of camping, and got plenty of beautiful nature. I couldn't have asked for a better start to my ride.
Getting to New Zealand, though, hadn’t been easy. Of course, by using the magic of air travel I was making things infinitely easier for myself, but there were some complications. For one needlessly stressful day, a cancelled flight from Bangkok to Melbourne made my Melbourne to Auckland connection disappear into thin air. I also got my passport temporarily taken away from me in Bangkok as I was shepherded to a special hotel and generously allowed to sleep from 5am until noon. In the end, it took me four sleep-deprived days to get from Mumbai to Auckland.
On the plus side, I got to spend long daytime layovers in Bangkok and Melbourne on the way, getting several hours walking around in each city. And in a sense, it felt appropriate that it should be difficult to travel to New Zealand. For me to get to such a remote place feels like it shouldn’t be as simple as just enduring one long plane ride - it should somehow be a challenging journey. I'm sure I would feel differently if I lived in New Zealand or had to urgently visit for some reason, but as the leisurely bike traveller I am it feels thematically correct for this to be hard.
It’s not just the plane journey, either - there are famously strict biosecurity checks on arrival before you’re let into the country. One does not simply walk into New Zealand; you’ve got to declare all your food, plant and animal products (even anything made of wood), and any ‘used outdoor equipment’ - which is half of my stuff. Going through ‘something to declare’ I felt I got off lightly with just a confiscated bag of dal. I was spared the full bicycle-box search after telling them that my bicycle had been professionally cleaned in Mumbai, and with that, I was set loose in Auckland.
With all the stress of travel, I arrived in Auckland without much of a concrete plan for how I'd proceed. As ever, I was surprised to ever make it as far as I'd come. The one thing I had arranged was a Warmshowers host to stay with: Donald, an easygoing older man who’d cycled around Europe and New Zealand with his wife and had hosted countless cyclists before (his wife was away for the week, so I didn’t meet her). I slept a lot, bought food for the camping ahead, and plenty of spices, and got some advice from Donald. Two months in New Zealand is slightly shorter than ideal, but it’s still plenty of time if I skip some more boring sections. Donald recommended that I skip the populated section out of Auckland and take the bus to Te Kuiti to start there, and that I skip the highway into Wellington and take the train instead. Overall, it’ll give me less time on the more populated North Island, and more time on the emptier South Island.
Planning my route with Donald, I could see the sketch of the next two months starting to take shape in front of me. For the first time, I felt like my year of travelling on a bike was entering the final phase. I had a serious deadline for the first time and I wanted to spend as much time in nature as I could before the end. I'd stocked up well in Auckland, and I was ready to get back on my bike.
I left on Wednesday morning, taking the bus to Te Kuiti. After grabbing a few final provisions there, I headed towards Pureora campsite, at the start of the Timber Trail. With the morning already gone in the bus, it was a pretty ambitious target for a first day, with 55km of distance and 600m of elevation, but I was motivated to get there. The forecast showed rain all day the next day, so I’d probably have to hide in my tent all day. In that case, I’d much rather be in a campsite with water and a toilet than at a wild camp spot along the road.
My ride was made a little easier when, 16km from the campsite, a small truck pulled up beside me and asked if I wanted a ride. Yes, I said, that would be lovely. We loaded my bike into the back, next to several barrels of road paint, and the 16 kilometres passed by like nothing as I chatted to my new acquaintance. What a perfect piece of luck for my first day riding - if everyone in New Zealand is like this, it’ll be unbelievably easy touring.
At the Pureora campsite, I hurriedly set up my tent before the promised heavy rains and had a little chat over camp-stove dinner with two Australian cyclists who were riding the Tour Aotearoa route all the way down New Zealand. I’ll be following that route too sometimes, but deviating from it quite frequently on the advice of my Auckland Warmshowers host.
When the rain arrived that night, it was heavy indeed, but by morning the skies were dry and non-threatening. The two Australians decided to head down the trail, but I stuck to my plans of staying in the campsite for the day, sewing up some holes in my clothes and generally trying to avoid using my phone to save battery. I felt pretty silly hanging around when nothing was happening, but my decision was validated in the afternoon when it started pouring again. The Australians, as it turned out, had changed their minds as soon as they’d gotten on the trail, and took a lift to the end. A shame for them, because as I was about to see, it was a lovely ride.
I began the Timber Trail on Friday, late enough in the morning that it felt like I was alone on the path. The trail has a modern, shiny website, with expensive tourism accommodation packages at the Lodge in the middle, so I was worried it might feel overly commercialised, but happily it wasn’t like that. It was much more like just taking a ride through some quiet woods, with trees and birds all around and a dirt path ahead. There were some informational signs along the way, telling me about the forest I was in, and I appreciated the knowledge that I wouldn’t have otherwise learned. The surface was variable - in the woods, often bare dirt with rocks and tree roots to spice things up, but in other sections there would be neatly maintained gravel. The most exciting parts were certainly the suspension bridges, crossing canyons and rivers high in the air.
There was plenty of slow grinding up hills - my legs still unaccustomed to such strain after my time off the bike - and the rough terrain would be more suited to a mountain bike than my 40mm touring tyres, but I didn’t mind too much. I enjoyed being back on the bike, back in nature, and being mostly on my own. No cars, no trucks, just the birds, the insects, and whatever tune I'm humming.
I stopped for the night at the Piropiro campsite, a free basic campsite run by the NZ Department of Conservation. Like Pureora at the start of the trail, the campsite had drop toilets (no flush, just a deep hole with a seat on the top), water you’re advised to boil, no bins, and no electricity. It’s pretty much exactly what I wanted, and I loved that it was free. I set myself up and rode back a kilometre to the fancy Timber Trail Lodge to charge my powerbank and use their wifi, there being no reception otherwise. The staff kindly let me hang around without paying for anything, and when I went back the next morning for my powerbank I asked if I could buy any food, so that I could feel like I’d at least given them money for something. They served up a plate crammed with breakfast left over from the morning’s tour group, at the bargain price of ten New Zealand dollars (about £4.50). I left with my belly full and the feeling that I’d gotten an even better deal than before. The big cooked breakfast was a great luxury, being the first food in a few days that I hadn’t made on my camping stove.
The second half of the trail was also gorgeous. I’d managed to catch two rain-free days, and I enjoyed a long lunch break with a view over the hills and some hot masala chai. I got to stop climbing hills and start descending them, which was a challenge of a different kind, with the gravel track containing unpredictable grooves and bumps. I kept a tight grip on my brakes and tried my best not to skid off sideways. It was fun, like a rollercoaster, and I was quite disappointed when the trail finished, leaving me riding along rolling hills for the last ten kilometres with sheep and cows instead of ancient podocarp forest.
The trail officially finished in the tiny village of Ongarue, which seemed to be little more than a collection of houses and a couple of permanently shuttered shops. I camped in a tiny roadside spot (another free one) which had a flushing toilet and running-water sink - what luxury. Following the Tour Aotearoa (TA), the next town with a shop would be Taumarunui, just 22km away, and I planned to stop there the next day to restock before continuing towards Ōwhango.
It didn’t quite work out like that in the end. I reached Taumarunui as planned early on Sunday, but I’d felt some familiar early twinges of knee pain on the hills getting there and knew it would be smarter to rest it before it got worse. Also, I learned that the TA route down the Whanganui River, where I’d been intending to go, was closed due to recent rockfall (specifically, one really big rock blocking the way). It was the talk of the town among the cyclists in Taumarunui, as I ran into several familiar faces who I’d met on the trail, and the Australians from two days prior. Some people were taking a canoe tour down the river instead, some people were riding the ‘winter alternate’ route with extra hills, and one loud Brit was taking Highway 4 south instead. I’d have to figure out what option I’d take the next day, but for the moment I just settled into the paid Holiday Park campsite outside the town and enjoyed a kitchen, electricity, and a hot shower.
It was a luxury that I didn’t really feel I needed, since my last few days of camping hadn't been too harsh, which was funny to think about. Not too long ago, four days of camping in a row would have qualified for me feeling like I deserved a hot shower. I think using the DOC campsites with their basic facilities and getting some electricity at the Lodge had really softened things - it would have been something else entirely if I’d had four nights of totally wild camping. Still, it's a good start to my camping-filled last leg of the trip.