Welcome to The Big Walkabout

When last I posted, I was descending a hill, laughing out loud at the beginning of a wild adventure - one which had only just begun. Cut to black, roll credits. Of course, real-life adventures are not like their movie versions. The descent flattened out and became a climb. What goes down must, in all likelihood, go back up, and the hills in New Zealand almost guarantee this near certainty. ...

Today I started the Tour Aotearoa, 3,000km (1,800-mile) cycling route linking the northernmost point of New Zealand with its southernmost point. To get there has taken about 19 days and has come with a bit of its own crazy story, which will be added to retroactively. But to summarize, in those 19 days, I have traveled from Christchurch, which is about 2/3rds of the way up the South Island, all the way to the tippy top of the north. To do this, I first cycled from Christchurch to Picton via the Sounds To Sounds route, another long-distance trail connecting the Queen Charlotte Track in the north to the Milford Sound in the south. From Picton, I took a ferry to Wellington and stayed a few days, seeing the town. The ultimate goal, however, was to get to the start of the Tour - no easy feat. In the end, I opted to take a car and drove (on the wrong side of the road) from Wellington to Auckland. From Auckland, I took a bus to a town called Kaitaia, then cycled the 100ish km (during which I waited out a storm that brought ~4.7 inches of rain) to the Cape Reinga lighthouse and the start of the trail. There are, of course, many parts of this story that have been grossly summarized here, but to get something out, I have chosen to skip them in favor of writing about this new natural starting place, with the intention to fill them in later. ...

Welcome all to Alex’s Big Walkabout. The plan is to generally head north to the tip of the North Island, before generally heading south on New Zealand’s Tour Aotearoa (the TA). That isn’t much of a plan, realistically, and that is kind of the point - to try on what it feels like to have almost no plan, and figure it out. In the last post, I was on a plane, 30,000 feet in the air somewhere in the twilight zone of 32 hours of travel from AUS to LAX, then to HKG, and finally to CHC, which was an adventure all in its own, which ended with a landing. ...

0400 is a groggy time to be waking up and headed to the airport. Excitement - or was it anxiety? - mixed with a handful of fatigue, and a pinch of serenity as I found myself driven to the airport. In the car, a large grey box was taking up almost the entire truck and back seat, and a grey black duffel bag. The box carried my bike, broken into pieces and packed in foam between two hard plastic shells. In the bag, clothes, a helmet, sleeping bag and bad, and a pot. Together, these two bags will make up the entire contents of my life for the next 11 weeks. ...

Welcome! You have found the location for my Big Walkabout. TL;DR: You can SUBSCRIBE to this page, and receive an email when I make a new post. Use the email newsletter box below to put in your email. Feel free to send this around to the folks I may have missed in my initial blast, and others who you think may be interested in following the adventure. Feel free to respond to the posts. I will be doing other things than checking email, but I would love to hear your thoughts or questions. ...