Hello,

I've planned a cycling tour in New Zealand for February/March 2010.
The tour planning is completely finished, we've allready booked all accommodation.
But one of the two women on our tour had to cancel the tour because of a foot injury.
Now we are only 1 woman and 3 men.
So we are looking for a woman who'd like to take part in our tour, even though it is probably a bit late.

Tour details:
Start: February 9. in Dunedin (South Island)
End: March 23. in Auckland

Duration: 6 weeks, with a total distance of 2250-2450 km by bicycle. A 4-day hike is planned (Kepler Track in Fiordland National Park). Furthermore, we'll do a couple of one-day hikes in areas that aren't accessible by bike.

Daily distances on cycling days: 50-130 km, on average 90 km.

When planning the routes, I tried to avoid extremely busy roads. Thus, we'll take gravel roads once in a while (one day with 100 of 130 km gravel, the other days are mostly no gravel, sometimes 30% gravel).

Participants:
Lili (Canada), 61 J.
Michael (me, Germany), 26 J.
Ray (Canada), 67 J.
CJ (USA), 51 J. - only South Island
Charlie (USA), 60 J. - only North Island

More information about the tour, cycling in New Zealand in general and tour maps (see bottom of the page):
http://www.wagner-michael.com/nfld/wiki/wikka.php?wakka=NzPlanning

Contact: send me a PM over this forum or use the following address: my initials "mw", an underscore, the Initials for the destination country AT web.de

Why New Zealand?
The lanscape is great, a lot of different landscapes in a relatively small country (small compared to Canada).

Previous tours:
I did the Tour du Canada in 2003, i.e., cycled from the Canadian West Coast to Newfoundland / Atlantic Ocean.
And in 2005, I did an 8 week cycling tour of the whole Island of Newfoundland (+ Southern Labrador), Canada.
In Europe, I did mainly shorter tours or stayed at one place for a week and explored the area by bike.

If you are interested, please reply within a couple of days (until January 22), to avoid that we started cancelling the extra bed.

Michael

Hi Michael,

I took a look at your website - we did the same tour in 1999 (but started in Auckland). I made myself a promise to repeat this someday... and I wish I could be the missing woman in your travelgroup, but it´s not possible this year.

I know which 130 km long graveled road you will take - after 30 km and hours and hours later we gave up and
ended up on the van from the postal service... It`s somewhere between Lake Taupo and Wanganui, isn`t it?

We did the Routeburn Track - they have limited the number of hikers on the track, so we had to wait 2 days, till we could start. From the end at Milford Sound we took a small plane back to Queenstown - I recommend this option to you - it`s faster than the bus and the view from above is really great.

We finished our cycling tour in Nelson - and if you like to feel like Robinson Crusoe for a few days- you shoud hire a sea-kayak and travel along the coast in the Abel-Tasman. We did this for 5 day - this has been a real highlight on our tour!

Have a nice trip!
Dani