Mountain Biking and a Day of Rain

Our trip from the North took us through Auckland, where we took the opportunity to pick up a few supplies. Now, bear in mind that we're doing this trip on a shoestring budget, so only the absolute bare essentials were possible... namely clip-in biking shoes for Andrea, and an inflatable kayak for the many oceans, lakes, and rivers we keep crossing that we're dying to get into.

With those essentials safely packed away into our increasingly geared up camper, we headed south down to Rotorua which, in addition to being NZ's most heavily visited tourist city, is also home to some of the country's best Mountain Biking. After a peaceful night at a commercial campground (they had hot showers and laundry machines - both of which helped remedy some of our odours), we headed into the Rotorua Redwood Forest to give Andrea her first REAL taste of Mountain Biking.

After a couple quick loops around the parking lot and Andrea scoping out the physics of how these mystical clip-in shoes functioned, we headed into the trails. We confidently rode past the first right (kids loop - ride with caution) and sought out some more challenging "level 2" trails. Andrea immediately perked up when we got into the woods and cheerfully exclaimed "I love this - this is so much better than those hot gravel roads we've been biking up" and rode like a pro in her new gear. The beauty of the new shoes was that with her feet now securely fastened to the pedals she was able to generate forward thrust on both the down- and up- stride. The downside, however, is the falling. Which she did. Anyone who has seen Andrea ski knows that while she's generally quite fearless, she's also a bit of a tank who rarely falls. On the bike, with her feet clipped in, the cards were stacked against her. After the first fall, a fellow rider rode past her, asked if she was ok, and then continued on to find me waiting slightly up the track... he helpfully suggested that I might want to double back. After the second fall, Andrea was starting to get a bit more frustrated. The third fall, which happened 90% of the way up a challenging up-hill on a more difficult "level three" track, had the bike fall directly on top of Andrea's still securely clipped in leg. The result was some bleeding from the arm and leg area, some bruising of the calf, some welled up eyes, and her near immediate exclamation "dammit Andrea stop doing that!". Despite the tumbles, Andrea assures me she loves the sport and there is lots more of it in store for us during the rest of the trip. The trails were absolutely incredible. We rode maybe 5% of what they have freely available and we were more than kept busy for four hours. The tracks are all well marked, well groomed, and challenging for everyone from first timers to experts. The park also just happens to be within 10 minutes of three lakes, countless thermal pools, and what is apparently some pretty decent downhill skiing... heaven.

Following the biking, we took a dip in a nearby lake to clean ourselves off. Rotorua is a very thermally active city and while the lake wasn't bathwater warm it was a very comfortable post-workout bath.

We now find ourselves in a nearby Taupo in a very basic campsite where we're bunkering down and waiting out some weather so that we can get a couple highly rated hikes and mountain bikes. It rained pretty heavily overnight and off and on (on more than off) all day today. We ventured out on our bikes to the Department of Conservation information office within the park to get some route details on paths we're planning on taking. The return trip was almost painful it was raining and blowing so hard. Deciding the outdoors weren't looking so attractive, we fired up the first "Lord of the Rings" movie and prepared ourselves for some of the sights our hikes would take us past in the coming days (the hike we're planning on doing next is over "Mount Doom" from the movies).

Signing off, I'll answer a couple of the questions we've got in comments and emails so far:
- the camper has no A/C, but thankfully despite the 40C days, the evenings have been tolerable for sleeping
- our nightly accommodations so far has been entirely the camper, with a mix of "freedom camping" (finding a flat spot on the side of the road), DOC campsites (very basic sites with varying degrees of toilets, water supplies, and if we're lucky, cold showers), to our one night described above in the luxury "commercial campsites".
- For those of you betting, its day 12 and we haven't gotten into a major fight
- Most useful item brought so far, definitely the duct tape – bug proofing and general repairs, although after today the NetBooks are sadly a close second. The most useless... my blackberry (seldom functioning) and my bluetooth headset (we're lucky if we get text web-pages loading on our patchy cellular internet connection, Skype so far has been out of the question).

Sorry my first post got a bit long - I'll be the brief one from now on I promise!