A day cycling from Murchison to Kerr Bay Campsite near to St. Arnaud - about 63 kms or 40 miles. I booked tonight's DOC (Dept of Conservation) campsite using the web on my phone - very useful because there isn't much in the way of camping at St. Arnaud apart from these space limited sites. Then we headed first of all to the 4square and the bakery. The bakery provided some of the over-rich muffins that are pretty popular in NZ - we ate a blueberry and cheesecake muffin each and then felt like we needed to cycle to deal with the sugar rush. But first we called in on the i-site and booked the ferry from Picton to Wellington, since the plane is getting alarmingly close at only one week away - and still some miles to do.Then along the busy highway 6 that goes from Nelson to Greymouth and which we did some month and a half ago heading the ther way. It was a bit too busy today - between Murchison and the turning onto the 65 for St. Arnaud it is twisty and there is mostly no shoulder. But there are trucks and a fair few dairy lorries, cattle lorries, etc, notably of the pull-along variety (a cab and truck pulling another truckload). Generally they are loathe to slow down.After the turning onto highway 65 things got much better. The road continues along the Buller Valley gently uphill. The road goes straight as an arrow for some kms at a time. It was tricky stopping for lunch because bees and blackflies are enthusiastic about people in this area. We moved on after about 20 mins.St. Arnaud is a small tourist town with one pricey shop (e.g. muesli cost $8.90 - in UK terms, £4.45 for a relatively standard 750g of muesli), a chippy and some accommodation. The shop had also failed to tune its radio in properly and I asked why they didn't tune it in or switch it off since having fairly loud white noise played at you was painful. This was not a popular question - people are used to living in a soup of irritating noise so they hardly care (planes, cars, background music, etc) if it is just white noise.We chatted to Lee who turned up outside the shop and waited for his cycling pal who was slower up the hills (I'm slower than Guy but that's because my bike is heavier ;-) ). They are doing a tour of NZ in five weeks - doing the main sights. It seemed a very brave notion. After almost three months we could still do with much more time to feel we'd really seen pretty much all of NZ (we've missed out all the areas with no roads - massive areas of fjiordland, the huge area of the Tasman National Park, etc, etc - plus all those remote places we don't have time to reach...).Lee was sporting the 'I bike therefore I transAm' so we knew he'd done the transamerica crossing. He did it last year as part of the Adventure Cycling Association group. We love route 76 across the USA so we were rapidly deep into comparing memories of the route, the towns the route goes through.Finally to the campsite where we cooked in the very basic kitchen, while being stung (Guy) by a wasp and snacked on by blackflies (both). I went for a swim in Lake Rotoiti - right by the campsite. There's a wonderful jetty for throwing yourself off into clear cold water (on the photo you can see where a previous 'jumper' had left ripples - I guess they cleared any eels out of the way ready for my jump). We had a short walk later and a lady pointed out the large eels that lurk around the jetty. Glad they didn't bite... I had seen other people swimming so I guessed it was pretty safe.The walk showed us how the conservation dept are trying to kill the wasps so that other creatures can feed on the sticky goo produced by the beech trees scale insects. Around here this food source is being monopolised, more or less, by the wasps (an introduced species). The black fungus that grows on the scale insect deposits is remarkable - at first sight the tree looks burnt (we've seen this phenomenon repeatedly while amongst the South Island beech forests) but it actually has a funny pustular sticky-ish black growths on its bark.
A day cycling from Murchison to Kerr Bay Campsite near to St. Arnaud - about 63 kms or 40 miles. I booked tonight's DOC (Dept of Conservation) campsite using the web on my phone - very useful because there isn't much in the way of camping at St. Arnaud apart from these space limited sites. Then we headed first of all to the 4square and the bakery. The bakery provided some of the over-rich muffins that are pretty popular in NZ - we ate a blueberry and cheesecake muffin each and then felt like we needed to cycle to deal with the sugar rush. But first we called in on the i-site and booked the ferry from Picton to Wellington, since the plane is getting alarmingly close at only one week away - and still some miles to do.Then along the busy highway 6 that goes from Nelson to Greymouth and which we did some month and a half ago heading the ther way. It was a bit too busy today - between Murchison and the turning onto the 65 for St. Arnaud it is twisty and there is mostly no shoulder. But there are trucks and a fair few dairy lorries, cattle lorries, etc, notably of the pull-along variety (a cab and truck pulling another truckload). Generally they are loathe to slow down.After the turning onto highway 65 things got much better. The road continues along the Buller Valley gently uphill. The road goes straight as an arrow for some kms at a time. It was tricky stopping for lunch because bees and blackflies are enthusiastic about people in this area. We moved on after about 20 mins.St. Arnaud is a small tourist town with one pricey shop (e.g. muesli cost $8.90 - in UK terms, £4.45 for a relatively standard 750g of muesli), a chippy and some accommodation. The shop had also failed to tune its radio in properly and I asked why they didn't tune it in or switch it off since having fairly loud white noise played at you was painful. This was not a popular question - people are used to living in a soup of irritating noise so they hardly care (planes, cars, background music, etc) if it is just white noise.We chatted to Lee who turned up outside the shop and waited for his cycling pal who was slower up the hills (I'm slower than Guy but that's because my bike is heavier ;-) ). They are doing a tour of NZ in five weeks - doing the main sights. It seemed a very brave notion. After almost three months we could still do with much more time to feel we'd really seen pretty much all of NZ (we've missed out all the areas with no roads - massive areas of fjiordland, the huge area of the Tasman National Park, etc, etc - plus all those remote places we don't have time to reach...).Lee was sporting the 'I bike therefore I transAm' so we knew he'd done the transamerica crossing. He did it last year as part of the Adventure Cycling Association group. We love route 76 across the USA so we were rapidly deep into comparing memories of the route, the towns the route goes through.Finally to the campsite where we cooked in the very basic kitchen, while being stung (Guy) by a wasp and snacked on by blackflies (both). I went for a swim in Lake Rotoiti - right by the campsite. There's a wonderful jetty for throwing yourself off into clear cold water (on the photo you can see where a previous 'jumper' had left ripples - I guess they cleared any eels out of the way ready for my jump). We had a short walk later and a lady pointed out the large eels that lurk around the jetty. Glad they didn't bite... I had seen other people swimming so I guessed it was pretty safe.The walk showed us how the conservation dept are trying to kill the wasps so that other creatures can feed on the sticky goo produced by the beech trees scale insects. Around here this food source is being monopolised, more or less, by the wasps (an introduced species). The black fungus that grows on the scale insect deposits is remarkable - at first sight the tree looks burnt (we've seen this phenomenon repeatedly while amongst the South Island beech forests) but it actually has a funny pustular sticky-ish black growths on its bark.