Southbound

We took the short flight to Kaitaia on a splendid little 19 seat plane.  On these internal flights in NZ there is no airpot security....none!  You walk into the terminal and board the plane; no searches no scans, no showing your passport 11 times.  You could have a backpack full of Semtex and a nail file hidden in your shoe but nobody gives a rats.  There were 7 people on the plane, two of them were driving.

We then joined a coach tour to the cape and we were finally started assembling bikes at about 12:30.  For Neil this involved covering an area the size of a football court (arena? pitch?) with bicycle parts and the content of two panniers and a bar bag.  In 10 minutes I was fully assembled and ready to go and, about 6 weeks later, so was Neil.

It was just as hilly as last time but at least this time it didn't come as a horrid surprise and the hours groaning on the turbo trainer seemed to have helped.  We did 65 miles back down the peninsula (can you believe that this road - which is National Highway 1 - was only fully sealed in 2010?) and spent the night in a nice campsite in a typical small NZ community which has about 50 houses, a pub and, naturally, 93 pie shops.  Our only neighbour was a Canadanian cyclist who has been touring around North Island for the last few weeks.

Despite the time difference, the fact that we were up at 3:30 and the hilly miles we managed to sit around until 10 pm before falling into something that was more like unconsciousness than sleep.