Day 13: Wanaka-Queenstown
Today was wet, which is not great. It wasn't on a State Highway! But the road it was on was just as narrow and busy. It wasn't good.
The route I'm taking is through the Cardrona area, which has a skifield of the same name. It's the Cardrona Valley Road, which is not a State Highway; it’s used to get to the skifield and it’s summer so I was hoping it would be quiet. It's a steady climb up to 1000m above sea level, then a fast downhill.
There was a surprising amount of traffic at the start, just after the roundabout where the road parts ways with the highway. I stay as far left as I can, and think optimistic thoughts about why the traffic is going to thin out. Probably just people popping into town from their nearby farmlet or something.
I've got a sandwich for lunch, but I'd stashed it unceremoniously into one of the pannier pockets. Unfortunately the lightweight plastic shell had opened, and the sandwiches fell out and wrapped themselves around the stick I used to put my chain back on. (Chains coming off happens from time to time on long cycle trips, of course.) Which was the end of the lunch sandwich; that stick was unhygienic when I found it and being used for leverage to get a nastily greasy chain back onto the chain ring has only made it worse. So the birds are getting the sandwich. And I’m on the lookout for a cafe or something.
I plough on. The road surround is flat grass, so I can use it if there's too much traffic. It get used. Probably just the organized tourists heading into the country.
The rain fluctuates; sometimes it looks like it's going to get sunny. But never enough for me to actually take off the raincoat. It's light rain all day.
I do find a cafe! It’s trying very hard to be classy; it sells Moroccan candlesticks for $145. I’d like a pie, could I have a knife and fork? The attendant basically says, well, another option is <mimes wolfing the pie while going nom nom nom> which was very evocative and I’ll happily remember it forever but it did undermine the whimsically rustic but upper-class atmosphere they were trying to create. I had the pie indoors, but took the fluffy seatcover off first and wiped the seat down afterwards.
From left to right: Starting out, all very grey and wet. Passing the Cardrona Skifield turnoff. At the cafe. Foggy vista. Another foggy vista; know that I have another 20 but I’m being restrained here.
The road shoulder basically disappears when the climb starts. Partly this is because of cuttings, where adding another half meter means excavating tons of rock. In other places it's got a guard barrier beside the road, which leaves even less space. I'm extra cautious, and stop before these closed sections to go after a line of traffic has passed. They're so long I'm usually caught and passed. It's unpleasant stuff. What are all these people doing on the roads? Don’t they know there’s a perfectly good State Highway nearby?
Then climb steepens. There's still not enough space, but there’s now a rain-gutter beside the white line. At one point a car has slows down behind me; they can’t pass because of incoming traffic. I ride into the gutter and stop, to make space to release the queue. Once it's clear, getting out of the gutter and moving is an extra challenge!
Near the top the road suddenly passes into dense cloud. Clear air one minute, thick fog the next. It’s genuinely just cloud though - the peak is above the cloud layer, there’s a very clear cloud ceiling.
But it means there's no view. I take some pictures, not much to do with no view - time to get moving. But the visibility is so poor I get my rear red light out, I need all the visibility I can get for the ride down.
It is memorable. The cloud is so thick that even though incoming cars have their lights on, they’re only visible from quite close. The road is simply not visible beyond about 50m. The scary part is that I'm not sure how visible I am, to any psychopath who is driving down behind me and going too fast.. . There's a guardrail beside the road so I can't go wide. So I’m freewheeling as fast as I can safely go, trying to balance staying safely in my lane, against minimizing the difference in speed between me and and speeding maniacs behind, because I’m not sure my back lights and LED vest and high-vis raincoat are doing much here.
Plus the thought that if I do come off the bike I’ll be even less visible when lying on the road…
Fortunately I get into clear air without anything bad happening, and I pull over at the first opportunity to take some pictures. Hard to convey this in pictures, the transition from clear to cloud is really sudden, it’s quite something!
The rest of the day was much easier. The rest of the descent was straightforward, with some fun switchbacks. No traffic problems - most likely because I was going about the same speed as the cars, so nothing caught up to me. Or that my wishes that all the traffic would go away, finally came true.
From left to right: Selfie with the view from the peak, all twenty meters of it. From the lookout, just under the cloud ceiling - much better! Another view. Clouds layered on mountains. Rather excellent switchbacks.
Once close to Queenstown, the route into town was on an off-road bike path, which was a very nice change of pace. Good gravel surface, varied enviroments. Then a heavy headwind. And some steep uphills. And the flat sections were seriously muddy, with puddles of standing water so big I couldn’t go around. I try to keep the speed down, I don't want to get sprayed in river mud. Try to avoid the mud wherever possible. Definitely don’t want to fall off at this point, if that happened I can’t actually imagine how I could get cleaned up enough to be allowed indoors.
The route passes under the final approach to Queenstown airport. Planes come low overhead, rocking and shimmying in the wind, all oscillations controlled fast, pilots taut.
From left to right: A very nice downhill section. Track damage and mud. A scatty and mostly flightless bird that ran up the path ahead of me to escape, only to fly away when it thought it was cornered. Glacier valley and clouds in Queenstown. Mountain range that looks a bit like a wave breaking. The water level was unusually high. Late afternoon godrays. Sunset.
The final section to Queenstown included a route called the "Commuter Trail", but it had at least a hundred meters of 10% gradient on gravel. I sweated up it in low gear, weight forward to keep the front wheel on the ground. It’s about the limit of what I can do, on my low-geared gravel bike. This is not a route for commuters... even if they have electric bikes.
Except for that Queenstown's bike paths were really good. Good asphalt surfaces for the ones around the center. Very nice and scenic gravel elsewhere. I went a few kilometers along the waterfront to get where I’m staying, if I hadn’t had enough of cycling and been running a bit late, it would have been a very enjoyable ride.
Tomorrow is on gravel, only a fraction on a regular road! But there's a 530am start. After today, I'd still happily choose it every time.
