Punting on the Avon "Once you spend enough time with people biking up hills, hiking in the rain, cooking for seventeen people, and setting up tents in the dark, they don’t stay strangers for long."

'm half hanging my head in shame. I know what you’re all thinking. I know I’m known for my crazy independent travels. And I know I’m known for selecting off-beat, third-world, politically-unstable, and often disaster-prone countries. But there is this beautiful island which lies down under and to the right that has been calling to me like a Siren for years, and there just wasn’t enough cotton in the world for me to block out the song. The season was right, a tour group came recommended, and so without even a Lonely Planet guidebook, I headed down to the southern island of New Zealand for a new type of adventure for me; organized travel with the Flying Kiwi.

I landed Christmas day in Christchurch (the name seems kind of fitting), and spent the next two holiday days wandering the largest city on the southern island. Large means something else down there where there are only 4 million people and the man-to-sheep ratio is 1:4. Christchurch is the most English of all the towns. I walked along Gloucester Street towards the Canterbury museum next to the botanical gardens where one could go punting along the Avon River near Victoria Square while sipping tea and eating biscuits and over-boiled vegetables and, well, you get the idea. Luckily, New Zealand is popular with Japanese and Korean tourists, which meant that while most everything was closed on Christmas and Boxing Day, I did get to chow on some good Korean Bi-Bim-Bap.

A pleasant campsite "The bus was a slight grade up from a school bus with bucket seats, overheard storage, and fortunately no wads of old chewing gum stuck to the floor."

Then the day came for me to meet my tour. I knew little about the tour except that it was some communal organized camping/biking/hiking trip, so I hoped that by self-selection, the others on the tour would be decent folk. I must say, I was nervous about relinquishing my freedom to sit on bus for 2 weeks with a bunch of strangers. But as these things go, once you spend enough time with people biking up hills, hiking in the rain, cooking for seventeen people, and setting up tents in the dark, they don’t stay strangers for long. So who were my fellow travelers? There was an Aussie, a Dutch, and a fair number of representatives from England, Germany, and the US. Russia also sent a few scouts, and I do believe they were scouts, as they were armed with infrared binoculars, GPS devices, and an entire duffle bag of other electronic devices, all of which did not keep them from occasionally getting lost.

Our setup was economic and simple. The bus was a slight grade up from a school bus with bucket seats, overheard storage, and fortunately no wads of old chewing gum stuck to the floor. Behind the bus was a trailer; one side was storage for our packs and camping stuff and the other was a kitchen with operating burners, food, and giant woks for cooking. Everyone was on cooking duty every three days and worked with their team to create your typical camp fare of noodles, curry, and the like. Simple, perhaps, and yet always quite nourishing and tasty after a hard day of play. Atop the trailer were the bikes, nestled into their custom-made bike rack. There was often the option to bike along an interesting stretch of the road and meet up with the bus further along at the lunch stop or camp site.

My first day, as the sun was still high at 6pm (it was great to have such long days), Brendan, our guide and fearless driver stopped the bus and proposed a 10km bike ride on fairly kind roads. I wasn’t aware that distances and grades might be longer than advertised. 20km later, uphill into the headwinds, through pastures of intrigued cows and swarms of wooly-balls with legs, the group of cyclists arrived to find our big blue whale of a bus with the back hatch open, creating a kitchen area of sorts. Tired as people may have been, tents went up, food got prepared, and soon we were all relaxing, eating, and laughing, the conversations and banter flowing as freely as the local wine.