A Stiff Shot of Reality

Today, we admitted we bit off a bit more than we could chew on the cycling portion of our trip. It is exactly like our first week on the AT—we way over-estimated our miles. Not to mention the fact that here, there is so much to see, a photo-op around every curve, and pushing big miles every day doesn’t allow for many stops. We’re behind schedule already, since we only made it to Franz Josef today. So we’re hopping a bus tomorrow, heading for Wanaka, and a long, hilly ride into Queenstown on Saturday.

Poerua River, south of Hari Hari.

On the shore of Lake Wahapo, between Hari Hari and Franz Josef.

The ride today was spectacular, going through rainforest on the way to a glacier. It’s amazing how steep and heavily forested the mountains are. We rode through corridors of rainforest today (a return to the green tunnel), with towering trees covered with hanging bromeliads and steep slopes with gigantic ferns cascading down them. Then we would cross a broad, rocky riverbed, with a stream clearly coming down from the glacier. Now, we’re in the village of Franz Josef (disturbingly like a Kiwi-scale Gatlinburg), with the glacier hovering above us and rainforest all around. Surreal.

Approaching the Franz Josef Glacier.

Fortunately, the scenery was astounding, because we moved into more hills today. I have to admit—we got our asses kicked today. It was just one of those days when we both felt totally out of gas, which is not good when you’re going over Mt. Hercules. On the plus side, we were at least traveling in the easy direction. But still. There were rest stops, There was bitching and moaning. There was Pancho shouting at me to leave him and save myself. Not our best day. So we’ll take tomorrow off, do some laundry, rest our legs, and start strong on Saturday. We’ll check in again when we get to Queenstown.