NZ Wrap Up
We have been slacking a bit here at Muffinandpedal but we’ve had some important things to deal with lately like residency issues and other boring garbage. Anyway in the next couple posts we’re going to wrap up the New Zealand adventure. This one contains the life and travel aspect of the trip and the one after will pertain mostly to riding.
NZ is home to some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. This one here is called Piha (pronounced ‘pee-ha’) a black sandy beach on the rugged west coast less than an hour out of Auckland city centre. It has one of the worlds deadliest rips and takes the lives of many tourists every year, all I can say is ‘swim betweeen the flags’!
Around the corner from Piha beach is a beautiful waterfall that takes about half an hour or so to walk to. The whole way is gorgeous, lush, thick green vegetation and at the end you’re greeted by this stunning sight.
The day that we were at Piha it started off as a cloudy drizzly day and in true New Zealand fashion by the middle of the day the Heavens cleared and the sun was out on the blue’ist sky you can imagine. Paul Beadle had his motorbike there and we all took turns at thrashing her up and down a quiet backroad near the waterfall. Here’s Mike Zombie Davies just “give’n ‘er”, he looks like he was made to ride a motorbike, haircut and all!
Same day we ventured a little further and hit another rugged west coat beach called Karikari, it’s beautiful and quiet with big sand dunes and weird plants like the ones growing in the foreground here.
One of my favourite things to do when I’m in New Zealand is to take the old road bike to Waiheke Island with the old man. Waiheke is only a short ferry ride from Auckland and is populated by 8000 permanent residents so it’s fairly quiet and very picturesque. There are quite a few amazing beaches there but this is my favourite called Onetangi. Here me and the old Salty Sea dog take a breather at the top of a steep hill overlooking Onetangi, from here it’s only a 5 minute pedal to a beautiful sandy beach and cafe’s with tap beer!
The West Coast beaches are the most rugged, usually full of black sand and each has a unique characteristic. Muriwai vezch is no exception with it’s enormous Gannet colony. A word of warning, it smells like shit, literally, bird shit!
They all perch high on the cliffs taking care of there young, at this height a fall would either induce flying or death so it’s no wonder that they are pretty graceful in flight.
If you’re gonna check out North Island beaches you cannot miss Cathedral Cove on the East Coast Coromandel shoreline. This col rock formation is just one of the spectacular scenes to see there and the water was the perfect bath temperature the day we swam there.
I got quite fond of taking nature pictures while I was there and I was pretty stoked on this bird shot. I believe it’s an albatross but I could very well be wrong, either way I like this shot.
Coromandel coast with friends. Beers, boys and moonlightis a concoction for weird behaviour. Wazman with his pride, Mike double fisting and on the right is the fine dance stylings of Paul Beadle.
Hopefully your attention span has made it this far, next time we’ll post up the last of our NZ riding pictures to wrap up the NZ adventure and get back to topics of the Northern Hemisphere kind