Philosofiction

Steve Bein, writer & philosopher

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Halfway, Baby!

November 20, 2022  /  Steve Bein

I made it to Wellington! Southernmost port of the North Island, 1,494 km (928 miles) from the Cape Reinga lighthouse, hometown of Sir Peter Jackson, only airport in the world with giant eagles. I didn’t hitch a ride with any feathered, overgrown deus ex machina to get this far, but I did cheat a teeny bit and take the train after a mechanical failure.

But please don’t hold the cheating against me, because I rode 1,591 km (988 miles) to get here. Two detours extended my ride beyond the official TA route: I rode the long way around Kaipara Harbor (the ferry wasn’t running) and I took the please-don’t-kill-me Kaiwhakauka Track instead of the would-have-killed-me Mangapurua Track (trail closed due to washout). Those more than offset my train ride and my hot springs hitchhike of three weeks ago.

Three weeks ago! Yeesh, has it been that long? It feels like I just started, and yet it feels like I haven’t been home in forever. But yeah, looking back, I started in Reinga on October 21, did my hitchhiking stint about a week after that, and reached Wellington on November 20. That’s about half the speed of the other TAers I’ve met, but nearly twice the speed I was managing on Tasmania.

My uncle Tim asked me if New Zealand really is that much more benign than Tassie, since nothing has really tried to kill me here. I’ve been thinking ever since about how to account for the difference, because he’s right: the TT kicked my ass every day, and the TA hasn’t. Here’s my best guess as to what’s different:

  • I’m a stronger rider. I didn’t train nearly hard enough for this whole adventure, but the TT was good training for the TA.

  • There’s pavement. I saw almost no sealed roads on the TT until the final two days, whereas the TA has me on sealed roads almost every day. Gravel is an energy vampire. I reckon the difference in efficiency is somewhere around 25% (meaning the resources I spend to ride 20 miles on gravel get me about 25 miles on pavement).

  • No hypothermia. When you take that off the table, everything gets more efficient. Taking breaks on Tassie often meant changing from wet clothes into dry clothes to mitigate heat loss. Intellectually I understand it doesn’t take that much time to change shirts, but somehow psychologically it just seems like one more hassle, which makes me want to take fewer breaks, which gets me to…

  • I quit. Way earlier now than I did on Tassie, way more often. I still hear that little voice that says, come on, one more push, just to the top of that next hill, but now I’m much more willing to tell it to shut up.

  • One does not simply bike into Mordor. Tasmania is a lot more like Mordor than the North Island. The land itself is harsher. The slopes are steeper, the wind bites deeper, there is evil there that does not sleep. Booster actually weighs more there, because here in NZ there’s almost always a farmhouse within a few kilometers and I’m not shy about knocking on doors to ask if I can top up a water bottle. Water is bloody heavy and here I never carry more than a liter.

  • I’m no longer harboring the enemy. My old GPS compooter was an active hindrance. There were days it doubled how far I had to ride. Even the compass was off. My new compooter is almost always wrong, but I can tell what it’s trying to do. It can’t find my route, but once I find it myself, it tends to stay on it. When it says I’m headed the wrong direction, I push on a few hundred meters and it self-corrects. In short, it’s terrible at what it’s supposed to do but it doesn’t sabotage the whole mission.

  • I’m better at this. Tassie was a baptism by fire. There were a lot of hard lessons there, right from day one. The GPS problems, the flat tire, little hiccups about things like food shopping or fuel rationing, details I didn’t know to pay attention to then that I’m always cognizant of now. Even packing more intelligently is a big advantage.

The fact is, the TT would kick my ass again if I rode it today, as the Kaiwhakauka Track proved a few days ago. (Was it a week already? Jeez.) But I’d recover from the ass-kickings better, and the TA just isn’t the ass-kicker the TT was. In truth is it’s more dangerous, inasmuch as I’m in traffic a lot more here than I was there. But inattentive drivers are nothing to write home about—so far! fingers crossed—so they’re not making it onto the blog.