- "What a privilege to know the profound stillness
and the peace of the land, to see star spangled skies, and to listen to
the pulse of the universe." Jill Tremain
- Even the dogs don't bark at bicyclists in New Zealand.
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- If ever there was a paradise for a touring
bicycle rider, New Zealand takes the cake. The South Island with
its 12,000-foot glacier covered summits possesses extraordinary mountain
vistas. But it doesn't end there. Animal life abounds along the rocky
seacoast including countless shorebirds. On the domestic front, sheep,
more than 21,000,000 of them, outnumber the human population seven
to one. Four million year old Meroki Boulders "hatch" out
of the sand along the coast on the east side of the South Island. Kiwi
birds hide in the darkness while penguins and sea lions frolic in
the surf.
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- Doug and I spent three days in Christchurch.
That lovely Victorian City features characters like the Wizard and
the Bird Man. The former is a self-proclaimed theologian who walks
into the city center daily and preaches a sermon on most any subject
that catches his fancy. His "sermons" cause wild reactions
among tourists. More mild mannered, the Bird Man provides a walking
perch for hundreds of seagulls that inhabit the city. His avian friends
trust him and fight for the honor of perching on his cap.
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- But paradise sometimes exacts a price. We
rode south out of Christchurch with a brisk tailwind. Being blown
down the road feels like a free ride. You get to laugh and sing and sit
in the saddle with little effort. A hundred miles south, we headed
west on Route 79 toward Mount Cook National Park, into the heart of
the highest mountains in New Zealand. We pedaled with side winds
blowing us across the highway, but that wasn't too bad. We made our
way through a valley until we reached Route 8 in Farlie. A wide open
plain covered with brown grasses brought us to a vista overlooking
the turquoise waters of Lake Tekapo. We cut across its lower end
and coasted for the next few hours on a tail wind that whipped along
at 50 miles per hour. We loved it until we hit Route 80 at Lake Pukaki,
headed directly into a 50 mile an hour zephyr. We pedaled into the
granddaddy of headwinds. Sixty mile per hour gusts thundered down
from the canyons in front of us.
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- Twenty-four miles separated us from the camping
area in the park. It might as well have been a 10,000-foot climb
with 16 percent grades. We stopped for a drink at the intersection.
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- "You sure we want to do this?" Doug
asked.
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- "No kidding man," I said. "This
is an inland hurricane. We're gonna' be blown off the road. I don't
know how we're gonna' make it."
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- "We'll be in Granny gear the whole time,"
Doug said. "Let's get it done."
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- From there our five-hour ordeal began. With
the mountains in front and to our left, and the white caps on the
lake, we cranked into a savage wind. An invisible force ripped at
our bodies. Normally, we hammer out 24 miles in two hours. Not in
that wind. We cranked along, heads down, hands gripping the bars
and fighting for balance. Blasts of wind howled in our ears. For
the first hour, a narrow canyon directed a cyclone at us. The road
pointed straight for three miles, but looked like forever. We pedaled
in the Granny gear the whole time even on slight downhill grades.
After six miles, we reached the storm whipped waters of Lake Pukaki.
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- The wind intensified as it exploded off the
flat surface of the water. We rode side-by-side, but one blast sent
me crashing into Doug. After that, we kept a short distance between
our bikes. On we cranked into this brutal gale-force wind. Up ahead,
swirling clouds played wildly in the mountains at the end of the lake.
We saw the birthplace of this raging tempest. It thundered and howled
at us. It ripped violent patterns into the surface of the lake.
That wind did everything in its power to keep us from our destination.
Hour after gut busting hour, we fought our way into this tempest
of sound and fury.
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- Near sunset, we dragged our weary bodies into
the camp area of the park. Doug decided to take a rest. I pitched
my tent; tossed the panniers inside and grabbed my camera. The sun
set high over the peaks. Shadows moved up the west face of the mountains
to my left. Glaciers hung to craggy peaks above me. I wanted to
catch the sun making its final lighting assault on the glaciers for
this day. I ran along a huge glacial moraine with my pack bouncing
on my shoulders. At the end of the camping area, it turned to bush
and moss-covered rocks. I followed a primitive trail that meandered
upward along a ridgeline. It climbed steeply offering me a glimpse
of five large glaciers. Further up the hill, a gray glacial river
came into view below me. In front, an enormous canyon stretched into
the distance-the result of a receding glacier whose foot was barely perceptible
under the south face of 12,500 foot Mount Cook. The clouds broke
momentarily giving me a full-blown view of its south face. Brilliant
mountain energy! Along the canyon, back toward me, on sheer vertical
cliffs thousands of feet high, four glaciers clung to their rocky perches.
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- Nearer my location, about a mile on the right,
a large gravel avalanche shoot, now still, cut its way through dark
green vegetation. In front of me, where I stopped to sit on a rock,
I enjoyed a grandstand view of the merging of two glacial canyons. The
one closest to me sported 300 foot high banks that resembled a canal
trough that featured gray rock overlapped with ice which protruded
like broken glass shards on a ghetto sidewalk. Along the rock fields,
sinkholes made indentations and 500-ton boulders lay around like broken
eggshells. On the left side of the canyon, nine glaciers in various
formations poured like cake batter out of the mountains. Beneath
each glacier and mingling around the base the ice floes-dozens of
waterfalls cascaded down jagged rock.
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- Above this grand mountain scheme, white and
gray twisting clouds folded into changing formations ghosts in a Disney
movie. The wind thrash and thundered all around us. It rushed
through the canyon to my right with the deafening roar of cannon fire.
Each volley blasted the ridge where I sat. The blasts bellowed over the
water of the glacier lakes below me and ripped up the ridge and roared
by me at 60 miles per hour. The wind nearly blew me over the ridge at
one point. I dropped to my stomach to save myself. The raging wind
blew the grasses so hard-they looked like water running over a dam.
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- As I watched this drama, wonder crept into
my soul. I let out a yell. At times like that, when the wind blows
and the ice cracks and rumbles, and rivers roar, and the mass of nature's
moving parts unite to create a natural movie with a screen that
stretches across the sky-it's at those times I know my life moves in
delicate perfection. Living feels right and good. No doubts as I sat
there in a howling wind with my spirit soaring and my eyes full of
blue, gray, aqua, white, ice, water and mountains rising to collide
with the sky.
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- Upon returning to camp, a Kiwi couple invited
Doug and I into their van for dinner. We talked for two hours before the
wind died. We walked out at 11:00 o'clock just as a full moon broke
over the summit east of Mount Wakefield. A slight drizzle fell west
of us across the Seffron Glacier, which we could see from our location.
What we witnessed, I've never seen before nor since. It's existence
requires the most exceptional of circumstances to occur. That night,
we saw one of the rarest wonders of the world.
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- "Would you look at that!" Doug said.
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- "Holy catfish," I said. "What
do you call something like that?"
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- "I don't know," Doug answered. "It's
not a rainbow, so it's got to be a...moonbow, yeah, that's it, a moonbow."
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- Across the sky to the west, created by the
blazing light of a full moon, and a clear sky to the east-a fully
arced rainbow swung from the ground, up over a mountain, into the
night sky, back down into the white glacier field, and touched down
again on the rocky ground in the distance. It shown in green and
yellow, but red and purple glistened in the drizzle, too. Within
the arc, a white mist curtain brightened the darkness.
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- "That is a once in a lifetime happening,"
Doug said.
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- "You know, this makes everything we suffered
today worth it," I said. "This is so amazing that I can't
even believe it!"
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- My friend and I stood there watching the moonbow.
In the silence, we heard other things-the heartbeat of the universe...
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- Excerpt from: Bicycling Around the World: Tire Tracks
for Your Imagination by Frosty Wooldridge, copies available at: 1 888 280
7715 , www.amazon.com ; www.barnesandnoble.com
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