735 Km / 457 Miles
This morning I set off at the planned 8am. I got my breakfast pie and coffee and hit the road for what I thought was gonna be an easy 50 km ride. But the WIND today… was horrendous. Some horrible weather was on its way, with a cyclone being predicted just off the east coast which was gonna hit in the next few days. What was meant to be 3 hours was almost 5, and by the time I was in Hick’s bay I was exhausted. Mentally I was tired, I was stressing about my route, about future travel and flights, about Covid 19, and how I was going to manage this impending Cyclone Gretel!
The first 10km were up along the coast to Cape Runaway so it started pretty flat and then it cut away from the coast and inland across to Hick’s bay. It was hilly and and the roads were winding, and the headWIND was challenging.
A few hours later I hit the east coast, and I’m at Hick’s Bay. Now this was a very small strange town, I’m not sure how or why people end up living here, and the people I met were…. odd. Haha! I stopped in at the general store, to stock up on food, as I hadn’t been in a town for a while, I was running low on any sort of substantial food. Well that was a fail… I had run out of cash at this point so was resorting to using my card, which was about to become a huge hassle!! The general store didn’t except “foreign cards” It was an Australian card – that I had used several times in the towns and cities, but apparently here in the small coastal town, Australia was so foreign that they couldn’t except my card. So no food for me, and a ride just up the road to the Hick’s bay lodge and Campground… or what they said was a campground on their website AND on google! It was just a lodge, they hadn’t had a campground for a couple of years now… BUT there was a campground a few kilometres up the road, so I gladly left Hick’s bay for a steep winding downhill road to the beach to them come back up again and get to this campground.
Te Araroa Campground – This was quite a nice set up, in the middle of fields and fields, I was so exciting for some quiet, relaxing chill time. And that lasted the few seconds it took me to cycle down the drive way to reception. I had troubles with my card again. They wouldn’t accept my “foreign card” either. The only other way around it was to get online and transfer some money directly to the owners account – which I was happy to do, but whilst trying this my Australian Bank blocks my card and my UK card is also blocked (no surprise when I haven’t used it in over a year). The dude seemed okay with me not paying, and sending cash in the mail from the next town I reach, but being me I didn’t like that. I wanted to pay my way, so I spent the next couple of hours on the phone/skype and on holds to banks!
After a couple of hours on hold, it’s still not sorted with my bank telling me there is no block, yet online I can’t transfer anything. During this “hold” time I’ve also been checking my emails to find one from Jetstar saying my flight in 2 weeks was no longer guaranteed because of possible border/country closures and COVID 19! I’m now freaking out. The bank has wasted all my sSkype credit and too much of my afternoon and nothing has been solved. The online transfer was still saying blocked but I tried one last time with my card on the machine to run it as credit on the machine, and it actually worked – much to the dudes surprise as Australian cards don’t normally work here! Well that’s one thing sorted, and also the camp shop has some food, and with my card now working I wasn’t going to starve… and I was happy to pay the ‘credit’ card surcharge – two things sorted.
Now the BIG problem. My flight and the rest of my NZ trip….
I set up camp, and took my laptop back to the reception to get on the wifi to try figure out my next move. Having my flight to Melbourne for the next Friday not confirmed I chose to request reimbursement to get a credit note and be able to change my flight to a sooner one. The Australian government were getting ready to shut their borders – I was in touch with friends in Australia, and I was stressing, they were stressing, we had no idea that a global pandemic was just about to take off! I managed to get a flight for this Friday… Today is Sunday, I have 5 days to get to Auckland airport. I’m as far from the airport on the North Island as I can be, and in the middle of no where with public transport – Im 500km away from Auckland airport and 180km away from the closest town of Gisborne where I can get transport sorted! I was leaving early tomorrow morning to cycle as far down the east coast as I could, I need to get to Gisborne bus station, which would then take me Napier which would then connect me back to Auckland. This was about to be a nightmare. Cyclone Gretel was going to make it hard to ride some long days but I didn’t have a choice. This was going to take all the mental strength I had.
I was feeling anxious, feeling nervous, I had no control and no idea how the next few days were going to pan out and if I was gonna make it to the airport to get this flight. Was I going to make it back to Perth?! It was going to be a big challenge to work through and get myself around the island on the bike, I was exhausted but I know where I wanted to be and NZ just wasn’t the right place or the right time right now…
“The cost of not following your heart, is spending the rest of your life wishing you had”