The Great New Zealand Cycle Tour - South Island Route

New Zealand.  Why does this country hold such a spell over me?  Even before New Zealand was transformed into a living, breathing, version of Tolkien's Middle Earth, it already held great allure for me.  As a child, I avidly watched Hunter's Gold and Children Of Fire Mountain, two TV serials that were filmed in New Zealand, and that were shown on the BBC during school holidays.  New Zealand, a country of two islands on the other side of the world from England, about as far away as it was possible to be without leaving this planet.  A country of such contrasting geological landscapes and the tattooed faces of the Maori.

After vacationing in New Zealand three weeks in 2004 and enrolling as a full time university student in 2007, I now find myself soon to return once more, this time on my first grand cycle tour.  The prospect feels me with excitement, trepidation and some anxiety.  How will it feel to return to this land that I love so much?  A land on which I turned my back in 2010, to leave in search of other adventures.  Will it feel like a home coming, or will I feel alien, the place and the people that I know having moved on and changed?  The very thought of going back fills me with emotion.  The thought that came to me, as I type this post was one of home.  Home.  There is a concept that is wholly unfamiliar to me.

With my cycle tour, I am not just cycling south to north, nor north to south.  It is my aim to visit all places, to criss-cross each of the islands, discovering as much of New Zealand as is possible from on the back of a bicycle saddle.  There are many places that I am yet to visit, many sights that my eyes yearn to see, and here is my chance, once and for all, to know this country intimately.

This afternoon, I was able to complete my route planning for the South Island section of my tour.  My plan is to travel from Auckland by train down to Wellington, and then travel across the Cook Strait by ferry to Picton.  It is in Picton that my cycle tour will commence.  There are two main reasons for beginning in the South island rather than the North Island.  The first is that my cycle tour will start at the beginning of February, which is towards the end of the summer in New Zealand.  The South Island will be affected by falling temperatures and a deterioration in the weather more quickly than further north.  It makes a lot of sense therefore, to begin in the south and head north as summer fades to autumn.  The second reason is that the South Island is far less populated than the North Island (1 million vs. 3 million inhabitants) and is much more rural in nature.  This means that the roads will be far less busy and will offer me the chance to become acquainted not only with my bike, panniers and tent, but also with the practicalities of cycle touring away from busy and dangerous roads.

My South Island route complete, I estimate 38 days of cycling to cover a combined distance of around 3,650km or 2,268 miles.  I cannot work out whether I view this as aggressive or too easy.  I am prone to cycle fast wherever I go and push as hard as I am able for as long as I am able.  Recently, I cycled a round trip of 48kms in a time of around 1 hour 45 minutes, under the heat and humidity of the Costa Rican sun, and on a heavy mountain bike.  It would seem reasonable to me, to be able to cycle around 100kms per day, with a heavily laden touring bike.  I want to take it at a leisurely pace and I also know that my trusty friend Google Maps, does not take into account changes in elevation, which I know will be of considerable importance in the mountainous South Island.  I plan on stopping regularly for coffee (trim flat white) and to take photographs of the scenery and other interesting objects and people.  If I find I have miscalculated, then it is fairly easy to adjust the timings, and keep to the same route.

This is my route map for the South Island.  My route is marked in blue, and I added each of the 38 legs of the journey with red numbering.

Andy's Great New Zealand Cycle Tour - South Island Route Map

For the most part, the route is generally clockwise in nature.  After Hokitika, I plan to cut across from west to east, back to Christchurch, and then cut across again to the west.  This allows me to take in some of the spectacular scenery of the South Alps mountain ranges and traverse some of the passes.  Looking at this route map gets me rather excited, I have to tell you.

So, there we have it.  South Island is planned out and now I have to begin planning the route around the North Island.  Oh, and there's also that one very small and incidental matter to organise as well, the bike!

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My Crazy Life of Dreams

There are some words that you never think you'd find yourself saying.  Some years ago, in Brussels airport, I remarked to a colleague that I couldn't wait to get back home to Budapest.  Those words came straight out with out a second thought, without a moment's hesitation, and it was to mark a significant shift in the way that I saw my life.  Now, some years later, living a very different life, I found myself sitting here in Costa Rica, casually telling a friend that I was heading up to Nicaragua, to renew my tourist visa the next morning.  My life, my crazy life and everything in between.

I always had dreams.  I don't know when they began or how they began, but that really is not important.  All that is important, is that they did begin.  They were not grand dreams, there was no master plan, there was no specific journey that I wished to make, there was nothing that I wished to accomplish.  I was just a boy who gazed out of the car window, who saw mountains, hills, valleys, water cascading down the side of the mountains after a rainfall, forming itself into babbling streams, and I knew that I wanted to be out there, I wished to walk amongst the nature, to be out of doors, a wanderer perhaps, but something more, something much more, an adventurer.

In one of those quirks of fate, I found myself as a ten year old boy, in the classroom of Mr Noon, my year six teacher.  Had my parents not decided to move to the south of England, I would have been sitting in a different chair, a different room, a different teacher.  On the side wall of the classroom, stacked in random order on some shelves, were some tattered, well read, old paperbacks.  Each week, we were allotted reading times and were required to select one of the books and to sit quietly and read to ourselves.  I began with Biggles adventures, following the exploits of the daring World War I fighter ace.  Perhaps I read something after, I do not recall now, and then I picked up one of the books that would change my life.  I pulled it at random and as it slid out from the bookcase, its back cover was facing me.  I turned it over to see a picture of mountains and its title: The Hobbit.

I had no idea what this story was about, but I began to read nonetheless and as I did, I found myself utterly transported into another world, a world that, even though I never knew of its existence before that time, I wanted desperately to find.  Bilbo Baggins is a reluctant hero who seeks out the comforts of home, who revels in them in fact.  When the chance of adventure comes literally knocking on his door, he is afraid of change, he is risk adverse, preferring to stay in the confines of his own world, the one that he knows, that he understands, and that is safe.  Here was something that instinctively I found myself saying, "I would go!", "Oh, for the chance!"  I longed for Gandalf to come knocking on my door.  It was impossible of course.  As I read of the adventures of Bilbo and his companions, I longed for the mountains, for the passes, to see valleys and great forests, to become lost, to fight for a greater cause.  My fires were ignited, yet they would slumber for many more years before I would begin to realise my own dreams and for adventure to come knocking on my door.

JRR Tolkien awoke something inside of me.  His writing, his stories, they created in me the adventurous spirit. But wait a minute.  Did he really, or did that already exist?  Hadn't my mother already been a key factor in that, taking my brother and I off on crazy late night car journeys, spontaneously jumping up to give chase to the sirens of an fire engine, so that we could investigate the goings on, taking me for walks in the woods with the dogs, across the fields, filling my head and my heart with the beauty of the out doors?  In my mother I had a kindred spirit that also sought out excitement and adventure.  Perhaps it is more accurate to say that Tolkien fanned the embers of a fire that was already there, it was already in my heart and in the blood that I inherited.  Those embers smouldered away just waiting for the right moment to leap up and burn bright.  A fire that was born in the very fibre of my being, and a fire that would eventually consume my heart, and become my life.

Dreams do not need to be big, nor do they need to be significant.  In fact, a dream can be anything that you choose it to be.  Let me rephrase that because this is important: you do not choose your dreams, they choose you.  A dream is anything that fires your heart with passion and desire, one that fuels the imagination and lets it run wild and free.  You know it, because when you think of it, you erupt in a spontaneous smile and a joy that flows from your inner being.  One of my own dreams was nothing more than a desire for adventure.  I didn't know where I was going to go, I didn't know when, nor did I know how I was ever going to achieve it.  I held that dream as a young boy, gazing out of the car window as we drove through the mountains of Scotland.  I yearned to lose myself amongst the mountains, to climb their lofty peaks, to travel the passes between them, and to be out in the wild. 

I think this is also a very important point to make.  A dream does not need to be a complete story, whereby you can see all the way through to the end.  A dream can begin with the first step and nothing more.  I decided to go travelling.  That was all I had.  What happened after was beyond my wildest imaginings and in no way, could I ever have imagined it.  However foolish your own dream may seem, it is not.  It is your dream and as such, it is your true calling.  To not begin it, is to deny yourself the purest form of happiness and the ultimate gift that you can ever bestow upon yourself - the love of self.

I am still in my dream and I never wish to see it end.  My dream is my life, my life is my dream.  They are one and the same thing.  I could never have foreseen this.  I do not know what will come next, I do not know where life is going to take me.  I try not to plan too far in advance, since I wish to live as much as possible in the present moment.  Life will take care of me, as long as I follow my heart.  That is what I have learned on my own particular journey.  Your heart knows what is best for you, it will never lead you astray, it will never betray you.  I know that if I have the opportunity for a new adventure, then I will take it, I will seek to suck out the marrow of life, to take the road less travelled, and to continue to live as deliberately as possible.  The words carpe diem are tattooed on my left arm for a reason.  I live by them.

It's a funny thing this thinking business.  I just had to stop and let a thought run its course, a thought that produced a big smile on my face, and that originated in my heart.  I realised that my quest for adventure will never end.  What will cease is my quest for travel and for the constant change that I continually put myself through.  At some point, I will have had my fill of that type of adventure and I will seek out a different one.  You see, one of my other dreams is the dream of fatherhood, which is perhaps the biggest adventure of them all.  And that is the one adventure I never want to miss.  The one adventure I must not miss.  The one adventure I will not miss.

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We Accept The Love We Think We Deserve

Last night, I watched the film, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, starring Emma Watson, Ezra Miller and Logan Lerman.  During one scene, the main character Charlie, asks his English teacher why nice people always chose the wrong people to date?  The teacher replies, "We accept the love we think we deserve."

As soon as I heard these words, they struck a chord deep within me, a chord which resonated to the truth of them.  I realised the truth of them because they applied to me.  After the film had ended, I thought on these words and I reflected on my own life.  I thought about each of my past relationships and I was able to see that always, I chose to accept the love that I thought I deserved, which in my case, has often been the wrong kind of love.  The pattern of my past loves has always been the same.  Until last night, I did not understand why that was.  Now I do.

All of my life, since those first impressionable days, when I was evolving my thoughts and my views on how the world worked, I have carried around with me a very poor residual self image.  I have suffered from low self-esteem for most of my life.  When I was young, around the age of seven, I began to put on weight.  Throughout all of my formative years, I was what would be classed as a 'fat kid'.  Added to this, I have always been short in height compared to my peers, something that has never changed.  At the age of 12, my group of friends and I were avidly reading The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien.  At school one day, one of my friends said that I looked like the character Bombur from the story.  For those who have never read the book, and who have not yet seen the movie by Peter Jackson, Bombur is the fattest, slowest dwarf, who is always eating.  The nickname was picked up by pretty much everyone in my school year and it was used so much, that when one of my classmates was handing back our exercise books after being marked by the teacher, he stopped and had to ask, "Who is Andrew Smith?" 

Being short and fat tends not to make one attractive to the opposite sex.  As my friends and the other boys of my school year were going out on dates, getting their first kisses, getting their first girlfriends, I was only getting rejected.  Every girl that I asked out said no to me.  It took all of my courage to ask, only to have my dreams quashed in an instant.  Funnily enough, as I think back now, as I told my friends one day at school, how I had cycled around to the home of a certain girl that I had a crush on and had asked her out on a date, the friend who gave me the nickname Bombur said to me that I had courage.  Even back then, at the age of twelve, the spirit of carpe diem was alive in me.  Now that is a very comforting thought to me as I sit and write this.

Everything that happened to me throughout these formative years reinforced in me the ideas that I was ugly, that I was a failure, that I was worthless.  My self-esteem, which I can recall was high early in my life, was sank further and further.  Every time I received another rejection, it only served to reinforce this notion of myself.  I used to lay in bed some nights and cry myself to sleep, telling myself that I was short, fat and ugly and that no one wanted me, that I was unloved, that I would never find love.  By the age of eighteen, after suffering from years of teasing and often being the butt of a joke, I did something about myself.  I had another moment of carpe diem, I dropped all of my so-called friends, and I began to change myself.  I lost the weight that had dogged me for so many years, but by then, the damage to my sense of esteem was already done.  I had formulated the opinion that I was not worthy of love and that I was unattractive.

Eventually, I did enjoy my first kiss, my first date, my first girlfriend and I fell in love for the first time.  My relationships never last very long though.  It has been remarked to me that I always let the 'good ones' go.  Often I have had the opportunity to form a long term relationship and I have walked away from it.  Back then, I could never have said why.  I always said to myself it is because I was scared of commitment, but now I have come to realise that this is not actually true.  My long term relationships have all been for the most part pretty complicated affairs.  I have never been able to figure out why this is.  Why is it that these relationships never ran smoothly? Why do I always fall in love with women that I think I can fix with my love?  Why do I persist in chasing someone who has doubts about a relationship with me, in the hope that I can make them change their mind?  Why do I try so hard to make someone love me?  Why do I continue to persist in a relationship when all of the signals are telling me no?  Why do I feel the need to prove that I am more worthy than another?  The answer lies in that line: we accept the love we think we deserve.

Last night, the truth was revealed to me through this line in the movie.  As those words were spoken, so I realised the utter truth of them for myself.  I have, for so many years, felt that I was unworthy of love, that I was undeserving of love.  Therefore, when love came knocking, I rejected those relationships that had real potential and instead, I chose those that were always going to involve complication.  In retrospect, I can see now that perhaps deep inside of me, I already knew the relationships would fail before they had even begun.  I was never conscious of thinking that at the time because at the time it happened, I was swept away by the romance of the situation and by the act of falling in love.  But I think that on some very deep subconscious level, I chose these relationships for exactly one reason only: they would ultimately prove that I was undeserving of love.  I created a self-fulling prophecy, which always came to fruition.  In a way, without ever knowing it, I sabotaged each and every one of my relationships before they had even begun.

It is my belief that a strong and healthy relationship must begin on equal footing.  Often, my relationships have not begun in this way.  Early on in the relationship, something was already going wrong.  I could see it, but I would not admit to it.  I thought that I could fight for love and win.  I thought I was deserving of this kind of love.  A love that is not freely given.  It is never right to begin a relationship thinking to yourself that you can fix the other person, that you can help them with their problems, that you can be the solution for them.  You cannot be.  No amount of love can do that.  Each one of us must first fix ourselves before we have a chance for a solid, long lasting, meaningful and loving relationship.  To think that the relationship itself or the love you bear for your partner can resolve problems is a fallacy.  To believe that you can fix someone through your love is not possible.  Not unless they come willingly and find their own solution through the love.  I see this now.  I saw it before only I denied myself the truth of it in order to find love.  The kind of love that I thought I deserved.  I was wrong.

Each of us is deserving of love.  Love is the glue that binds the universe.  Love is at the centre of all things.  Love cannot be denied.  Love is life and life is love.  They are one and the same.  You are life.  You are love.  You are worthy of love.  You are deserving of a strong and healthy love.  Do not settle for anything less.  Search your feelings, look deep inside of yourself, speak openly with your heart.  Seek the answers for yourself and if you find that your relationships are always a struggle, ask yourself if you feel that you are deserving of a special kind of love?  I can tell you one simple thing: you are.  You always were and you always will be.

This is probably the most deeply personal of my blog posts to date.  I am sharing this because I believe there is real value in sharing it.  I share my thoughts, not because I am searching for sympathy or empathy, I share my thoughts because I wish to make a difference.  If only one person should read this and it triggers a moment of realisation for them, then it is worthwhile.

Knowing what I know now, I am ready.  I am ready for the love that I deserve.  I am ready for the love of which I have been waiting my whole life.  My journey is my journey and I would not trade any of it, I would not change a single thing about it.  It is what has taught me the lessons.  It is what has brought me to here, to now.  For those that I have wronged because of my self belief in that I was undeserving of love, I say sorry and I ask your forgiveness.  We all learn.  That is the purpose of life.  We are evolving our souls.

We can never go back, we can only go on.  The one true path is the path of love.  Search inside of yourself, discover the love, discover your own one true path.  And know that the love you find there, is all that you deserve.

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