New Zealand. Family wedding. 19 hours in the air. 9,000 miles from home. It’s not what you’d call a “quick out and back.” An adventure.
The palpitating heart of adventure, of course, is uncertainty. Where to go? What to do? Will it be good? Will it be hard? Will we eat good food? These aren’t questions you can answer in advance. In fact, you shouldn’t, unless an adventure is not what you’re after.
We drive down from Auckland to Rotorua on the Monday morning, rent a pair of mountain bikes and climb up into the Whakarewarewa Forest, where palms and evergreens cluster around the bases of towering redwoods. The bush teems and buzzes as the trail switches back and forth up hillsides, until we’re far above town and lake, breathing hard, trying to take it all in.
My riding companion, fresh off the plane, blows up early and has to ride back down to the bike center for refreshments and rest. On my own, I continue to climb, eventually plunging down again through high banked turns. I’m smiling constantly, whispering “f$%k yeah” to myself, unconsciously.
I plow onward, through pine groves and thick fern, through all my own doubts, insecurities, and shortcomings, until I almost blow up trying to hurry along so my friend’s not waiting for me all day.
It’s also hot as murder.
Luck offers up a food stand in an unexpected parking lot. A warm Coca-Cola. A cold bottle of water. A snack. To complete my loop there are another 20kms of this climbing and descent. I consider phoning in a pick-up. Maybe I don’t need to go so hard on the first day, but eventually I resolve to keep going. I’ve come an awful long way not to see what happens next.
Fifteen minutes out from the snack spot, I catch a pack of eBikers on the long climb that skirts the edges of Lake Tikitapu and Lake Rotokākahi, the latter of which is sacred and can’t be approached by non-Māori. I ride along behind my new motor-assisted friends for a bit. They’re Kiwis and friendly, and they dispense some advice for riding at my next destination, Taupō. Unfortunately, they’re also slow, and so when they stop at a lookout to take photos, I press on.
Unexpectedly, I’m feeling strong again. Coca-Cola is a miracle drug.
The trail system in this forest is vast, over 300kms of every kind of everything. I’m taking things easy, because hospitalizations in alternate hemispheres aren’t my idea of a good time, but I can see the serpentine tech trails spinning away from the very rideable track I’m on, the 35km Forest Loop. In a perfect world, I’d live here for about a month. Maybe longer.
And have a primary care physician on call.
Even on a straightforward ride like this one, you never know what’s coming. It makes the heart flutter in ways both positive and negative. The bike, a Giant Trance X, is unfamiliar (although I paid to have the brake levers reversed because in most places they ride right lever/front brake and the left lever/lever left brake, so called ‘moto style), the heat is something to get used to coming directly from winter, and I’m not sure I really know how far 35kms is or how much climbing is left.
I’m here on reputation. Rotorua is an IMBA gold-level ride center. These trails have hosted World Championships and Crankworx tour events. And there are redwoods, the same as the Pacific Coast variety. How could I miss?
Turns out, I couldn’t.
But these kinds of adventures aren’t made of blind faith in the awesomeness of all things. My nephew said, “If I get married in New Zealand, will you come?” And you know what I said, but it’s 9000 miles by air to Auckland and another 140 by road (driving on the opposite side of the car and road) to Rotorua. There’s a lot of low-level stress in that trip, a lot of details to be worked out and navigated, and there’s some high-level stress as well, because so much is still unknown.
The riding, once it begins, is the best and easiest part.
I had a hell of a day on the bike in a hell of a pretty place, the sort of place designed for people like me to have peak experiences. I really enjoyed it, but I didn’t want to tell that story on its own, all beautiful landscape and flowing dirt, because that’s not how adventures go, even when they’re going very, very well, even when you get lucky, and it all goes right.