Aside from their dogged insistence on driving on what to many of us is the wrong side of the road, cycle touring in New Zealand is simple. Buses, trains and ferries carry bikes for free or cheap. Hostels accommodate cyclists, and if you stay on paved roads, you’re seldom more than 50 km from your next flat white (cappuccino) or lodging. In summer, daylight breaks early and fades late. But most importantly, Kiwis are big fans of the outdoors, tramping, great physical trials and anything kooky and sporty. Want to strap a whole bunch of gear on a bike and pedal around? Good on you!

Planning

I decided to rent a bike once in NZ, and this led me to a shop in a strip mall in Christchurch, well outside of the area where much of the damage from the recent earthquake was concentrated. The owner and I sat down with a map and he made suggestions, among them buying Pedallers’ Paradise, a cycle touring guide of the South Island. The guy that fitted my bike then loaded a multitool, pump, a patch kit, an extra tube and a chain link in a plastic bag and told me he’d see me in a few weeks.

I opted to cross the island by train and start from Greymouth, pedaling down the west, as most of what I wanted to see was on that side. If time, weather and legs cooperated, I planned to keep going on my ziggy route , through furled-fern forests so dense people complained you “couldn’t see anything,” over the Haast Pass, the lowest of the mountain passes, yet still sufficiently steep and fatigue-inducing that I would get off and push in the bucketing rain.

Preparation

There are many books that will tell you how to get in shape for bicycle touring. I can guarantee that neither the three septuagenarians (two of them named Judy) nor the homeschooling family of two parents and six children ages 4 (in a trailer) to 17 that I ran into en route had read them.

I hadn’t either. I planned to pedal at my plodding speed between 5 and 8 hours a day, covering a total of a bit over 1000 km the course of 19 days, with rest days interspersed. In preparation, I picked up the pace a bit at the gym, and one day loaded my panniers on my bike and pedaled 60 km uphill to a friend’s beach house. You might call it training. In retrospect, it was just practice.

What to bring

I brought with me two full waterproof panniers, with some essentials (pedals, bike shoes, two pairs biking tights, two jerseys, cell phone, warm clothes for off the bike, raingear, my DSLR) and some aspirational but ultimately useless items (a netbook, a skirt). I didn’t carry camping supplies, which meant I’d sleep in towns or hamlets. This sometimes required me to call ahead to assure myself a bed, and on one occasion, to rent sheets. I bought a cheap NZ SIM card to make calls, which usually worked, though not always.

I woke up every morning stocked with carbohydrates, packed my lunch (Marmite and peanut butter on pita), and the road unfurled before me, a black ribbon of near perfect asphalt headed (always) for the hills. The book, map and cyclometer kept me on track, though I would meet gearheads with GPS units on their handlebars, announcing the arrival of a new town under their wheels before they could spy it themselves.

I rode until coffee, rode until tired, stopped and took pictures, rode until the next town. At the occasional overlook Kiwis would treat me to biscuits and coffee, or when sand fleas swarmed, would whip out their DEET and spray exposed legs.

Every day I learned a little more of how to make it work, like bungee-cording an easily-accessible food bag atop my panniers, and placing in it a bottle of sweetened tea for sugar emergencies. Twice I was adopted by lone male riders, who could have ridden much faster had they not been waiting for me at the top of nearly every rise. We were giddy with riding around the antipodes, and fielded questions shouted out from tour bus windows. “Where are you coming from?” they would ask, cameras clamped to hidden faces.

In all, I covered a bit over 1,000 km in 61 to 108 km daily doses, with breezy, temperate weather, a day and a half of rain, and managed to apply an entire tube of SPF 90 sunscreen.

Route

I looped around on the main road south from Greymouth, passing both glacier towns and landing in Jacob’s river for a short day where I got to walk on an empty beach. Onward I headed to Haast Township, to face the Haast Pass, and end the night in an A-frame in Makarora. Later, I passed through Queenstown and Wanaka, touristy towns on the lakes, and then headed to the 140 km Otago Rail Trail, which I zipped through in a day and a half, because though it was picturesque and sheep-filled, I dislike riding on gravel.  From Middlemarch I caught the antique wooden Taeiri Gorge Railway to Dunnedin, and later pedaled the Otago peninsula, where yellow eyed penguins peered curiously, but the promised albatrosses were absent.

My ride ended in Oamaru, a town famous for its Victorian architecture and fairy penguins, which I tiptoed around. The next morning my bike and I got on the bus to Christchurch, and later that day I pedaled back to the bike shop where it all started, to the same guys tuning up the same bikes in the same strip mall. I handed back the plastic bag, patch-and-tube poorer from two flats.

And I left the bike and walked away from the shop and thought about how on my next cycle tour when someone asks me where I’ve toured before, I’ll have a much better answer.