So we've actually made some progress now and at this point we're resting up in Tauranga at our grandparents place. Yesterday was a full on day stating at 8.30 am in cooks beach outside of Whitianga and ending here at around 8.30 pm at night 180 km later. We were also lucky to have had the pleasure of experiencing a huge 30 km hill (14 km uphill) that managed to fully kick our butts, Someone also mentioned it was 27 degrees Celsius which we agreed as most likely to be right.
Now I guess I should mention the path we've taken before yesterday in order to reach here so continue below.
Starting in Auckland city we trained out to Papakura, next we biked up towards Cleverdon and then onto Kawakawa bay. Here we reached the first hill of the journey and near the top we meet these other two bikers one a young Maori boy and the other an older man we when't and had a coffee with them and also grabbed some avocados from there friends orchard, mate they were tasty!!! We then set up our tent in a random empty marae outside of Miranda.
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| Leaving Auckland |
The next day we biked into Thames and stayed with our mate Jamie and his family, they hooked us up with an awesome feed of muscle fritters and we rested up playing video games for pretty much the rest of the day.
The third day we travelled up towards Coromandel town and reached our first real hills I should say mountains as these guys were big.... you have to love the introduction they use in the Coromandel "We have two cemeteries and no hospitals so drive safe" Haha I thought this was kind of witty. Anyway those hills were big and it started getting pretty dark after conquering them and we couldn't be bothered setting up our tent so we continued biking along into a place called Whangapoua. the hill before getting into Whangapoua was a... "bad word" thats what it was. now along one of the roads this fella pulled over to the side of the road and asked if we needed a place to stay, so we headed back to his place. Funny enough it turns out that this guy Earl ended up going to college with one of our uncles, it's funny how New Zealand's so small like that. Anyhow we ended up swimming out to this Island and doing some super fail swan dives that actually hurt alot. However it was good to be off the bikes doing some other activities. When we got back in we then meet Earls son Wade who ended up being a crazy good video gamer who's ranked top in the world and he took us out to catch some fish, unfortunately the kingis weren't biting and all we got were bait fish... and the net also ended up being pretty empty in the morning aswell. In the morning him and his misses cook us up a huge feed of eggs, beans on toast, fish and cockels so we were all fuelled up for the days riding.
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| First Big hill just north of Thames |
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| First Big hill just north of Thames |
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| Mountain overlooking Coromandel |
Now on the fifth day after biking maybe 40 km we came to this one hill and I kid you not it was so steep that leaning back would actually lift the front tire of the ground with no effort required, it was an extreme effort to reach the top and we felt so done by the end of it. However we still managed to make it to Whitianga and later Cooks beach where we stayed at our mates the Nesbitt's batch.
We remained in Cooks Beach for an extra day to rest up and ended up walking around the rocks to the marine reserve and tried fishing on the edge of it but there wasn't really any good bait around and the oysters kept falling off our hooks it sucked and we also found a fishing rod that we hauled for a couple of km's around the rocks before dumping it, hahah we also pulled up a Cray pot that was empty except for this nasty bait that stank and entered our oral cavities, it was not fun.
Then yesterday we made it here to Tauranga. Sorry about the poor writing style, lack of detail and commas but I'm really bored writing this alone well Wolfy sleeps so I'm just chucking down details. so yeah..... Enjoy :) and hopefully Wolfy will write the next update :p
