Bike Tales : Pedalers in Paradise : New Zealand Macho madness in the world’s most perfect place to cycle

This country is to bicycling what the north shore of Oahu is to surfing--a place to do one’s sport amid such spectacular scenery and in such near-perfect conditions that it becomes difficult to imagine any other place ever measuring up.

In just two weeks of bicycle touring on New Zealand’s wild and empty South Island, it is possible to encounter rain forests, glaciers, fiords, waterfalls, a 12,000-foot peak and mile upon mile of brooding, wind-wracked, virgin coast.

And it is possible to do it without a single near-miss with a rampaging recreational vehicle and with just one or two punctured inner tubes. In the height of the New Zealand summer--our winter--one can ride for hours and see no more than a half-dozen cars.

I did it.

My brother and I, in our 30s, and our father, age 60, spent much of last January riding 700 miles from one end of South Island to the other--down the rugged, unpopulated west coast, into the towering New Zealand Alps and finally to Queenstown in the south.

It was not our first bike trip. We have cycled thousands of miles between us--up the watery spine of Ireland, across Europe, through rural China. We are in decent shape: My brother races, my father tours regularly and I pedal fitfully against encroaching middle age.

But in New Zealand, we found a bicyclist’s paradise--a world that transforms itself startlingly every 30 miles. In a single day, for example, I rode from the beach, up a river gorge, through an alpine pass, through sheep-flecked meadows and down into yellow, piney hills.

This time around, we chose to go on an organized tour--two guides and a polyglot group of 14, including an architect, his rock musician son, a motorcycle dealer, an economist, a pair of nurses, some computer types and a Canadian with a chip on his shoulder.

Most were experienced cyclists and most were men. A competitive machismo seemed to flourish in the group, like mold in a laboratory culture. In theory, our days were our own, to depart and arrive as we liked. But in practice, people were keeping tabs.

My brother, Elliot, could delay his morning departure by as much as an hour and still arrive before the rest of us at our day’s destination. From time to time, Fred, the cantankerous Canadian, would set out to beat Elliot to the day’s finish then blame a flat tire when he failed.

Several women noticed that at least one man couldn’t bear to ride behind them. If they rode together for a while, he maintained a safe, 15-foot lead. A van and driver accompanied us, offering time out for the weary; but who had the nerve to admit they were tired?

The riding was challenging. We covered as much as 100 miles a day on terrain ranging from flat orchard land to a brief but murderous 16% grade. But it was also manageable: My father did the trip on hypertension medication, never once taking refuge in the van.

New Zealand is a curious mix of the exotic and the familiar. It has some of the most extraordinary scenery and plant and animal life found anywhere. Yet one flies halfway around the world to find currency counted in dollars and cents, and reruns of “Beauty and the Beast” on TV.

That phenomenon has its advantages when bicycle touring. It is possible to ride through dense rain forest, then find a bike store with a needed spare part. The food is familiar: lots of lamb, fish, dairy products, home-grown fruit and vegetables and sweet desserts.

New Zealand is also a country that respects its environment and embraces activities, such as hiking and bicycling, that show similar respect. South Island is a vast network of national parks, scenic reserves and hiking “tracks” given over to those sports.

Drivers go out of their way to avoid shouldering bicyclists off the road. There were few trucks and occasionally we saw more cyclists than drivers. We rode intermittently with a pair of kindergarten teachers from Christchurch, a Kiwi journalist and high school seniors from Ohio.

Our group convened in Wellington, New Zealand’s wind-swept capital, perched on the hilly southern tip of the North Island, and from there took an early-morning ferry across the roiling waters of Cook Strait, past the mussel farms of Queen Charlotte Sound to the honky-tonk town of Picton.

The first day of biking took us south along Queen Charlotte Drive, skirting the sound--dense fern forest rising to the left, quiet bays and inlets below us. The road rose and fell gently, past deer farms, scenic reserves, tea houses and the occasional village.

We spent that night in Canvastown, a small cluster of buildings beside the Wakamarina River--all that remains of a tent city that sprouted there in the 1870s after a woman doing laundry in the river discovered gold and set off a local rush.

Our lodging was in the Trout Hotel, a ramshackle old hotel with a bar and pool tables popular with locals. The new wing where I slept set the tone for the trip--mediocre motel living and dull food, but easily overlooked amid the exhilaration and exhaustion of the daily rides.

(The best hotels on the South Island seem to be run by the government. We stayed in several, including a glorious old lodge in the mountains with a view of Franz Josef Glacier and a luxury hotel on the lip of shimmering Lake Wanaka.)

The following day took us past pine plantations, small farms, sheep-dotted hills and potteries, and along wide, wooded river valleys. We encountered our first long hills through increasingly dense, subtropical forest.

That night, we split up and each stayed with a family in the hip, artsy town of Nelson. My “home hosts” were Ivan and Noelene Ford, a retired coal-mining engineer and his wife, who share an insatiable curiosity about strangers and, better yet, Americans.

Ivan turned up to meet me, significantly, in a Hawaiian shirt--a souvenir of a memorable trip to Hawaii and California, during which he and Noelene had spent an entire day at Disneyland, then returned the following afternoon and stayed until 1 a.m.

We had afternoon tea in their living room overlooking the Tasman Sea. They debriefed and briefed me about crime, AIDS and Japanese investment. They talked of their own travels in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Zambia, and of their children, scattered around the globe.

Dinner that night was a rare break: fresh, green-lipped mussels, crab bisque and orange roughy in a restaurant called City Lights. A producer Elliot had met regaled him, my father and me with tales from New Zealand’s tiny but flourishing film industry.

The following morning, the group headed south through the rich fruit-growing region outside Nelson, strapping cartons of peaches, apricots and boysenberries to our bike racks. We picnicked atop Spooners Range, 1,450 feet up, with a 40-mile view back to Nelson and beyond.

From there, our route headed into the mountains, wandering up through sun-drenched yellow meadows. The weather turned, the sky blackened and our first hard rain arrived as we scudded into the village of St. Arnaud beside a vast mountain lake called Lake Rotoiti.

Every three or four days, we would rest.

Or that was the idea. In fact, we spent those days hiking mountain ridges, white-water rafting down the Buller River and helicoptering up onto the snowfield of Fox Glacier in the shadow of mounts Tasman and Cook. A planned flight over New Zealand’s most famous natural feature, the fiord called Milford Sound, was aborted by bad weather.

Our longest day--100 miles--took us plunging out of the mountains against a head-wind into the ever-deepening Buller River Gorge, past a wide gash in the earth left by the 1929 earthquake, past abandoned gold rush towns and west to where the river widened, grew shallow and poured into the sea at New Zealand’s coal-mining capital, Westport.

For several days after that, we followed the coastline, accompanied by intermittent drizzle and a fog out of which the rocky shoreline would suddenly loom--vast, black, rock outcroppings and at one point, a remarkable formation of hundreds of thin layers of limestone and mudstone known as Punakaiki, or pancake rocks.

The road then moved inland into the foothills of Mt. Cook, New Zealand’s highest peak, where the Franz Joseph and Fox glaciers extend to within 15 miles of the sea. We stayed several days there, in the Franz Joseph Hotel, a view of the glacier emerging from the low clouds beyond the sodden lawn below the balconies of our rooms.

Every day, the scenery and the ride became more remarkable. The most spectacular day was our second to last--a 90-mile ride inland from the coast, up the Haast River gorge, over a mountain pass, down through broad meadows and then 30 miles propelled by a tail wind alongside a vast, blue lake.

The ride began in a post-dawn fog, climbing slowly at 2% grade for several hours during which just two cars passed. Waterfalls by the dozens plunged down the densely vegetated rock faces on either side into the wide gorge. Innumerable creeks, with names like Greenstone, Mossy and Solitude 1 and 2, danced past beneath the bridges.

At mid-morning, the road turned south and began to climb steeply. Mountains towered above us on all sides. The road then leveled off and wound through a sunny upper forest before plunging south into the broad bowl of the Makarora River Valley and along the shores of the 50-mile-long Lake Wanaka.

Bicycling will never be the same again.

In the end, I concluded that the South Island of New Zealand is a cyclist’s nirvana, less exotic than China but in many ways preferable--a near-perfect mixture of wilderness and a few comforts of home, all in a compact, accessible space.