In July 2017, Jeff, James, Nigel, Mark and I shipped our bikes over to Australia for a one-month ride. From start to finish it was an absolutely brilliant trip. The well-structured route made each day of riding new and exciting, the camping locations were outstanding, the sights and scenery were brilliant and all of this was topped off with great riding company :)
Mark and I live in Christchurch so we regularly catch up, however the entire group had not been reunited for over a year. Mark and I decided it was time to change that, so we put our thinking caps on and came up with a group ride to the Kahurangi Lighthouse.
Anyone familiar with this route will know that it is fairly challenging, however this group proved in Australia that we work well as a team so we were pretty confident we’d all get to the end without issue.
The route sparked the interest of riding buddies Ian and Mark who joined the ride that we officially named, The Grandest Lighthouse Mission…
Very few photos were taken from the trip departing Christchurch and heading up to the top of the South Island. In fact, this was the only photo of the day when a tree had blocked one of the gravel roads and we had to pull out the pruning saw then pull out a few Graham Jarvis moves to carry on.
The accommodation for the night was a hut located in a cracking location. Below zero temperatures overnight made for a pretty chilly start to the morning.
The chilly start to the day made way for beautiful blue skies so it didn't take too long for it to warm up.
As we reached the West Coast and started heading south towards the lighthouse, very few photos were taken on this section, we were pretty busy shifting gravel :)
Crossing the first of four rivers.
After the first river crossing we made our way down to the beach and followed the coastline from that point forward. The views and rock formations were pretty impressive.
At one of the more challenging river crossings we watched a group of quads cross first. After some careful line selection we all picked our way across.
At the last river crossing that has around four times the flow of all three previous rivers we crossed, we had to wait around for the tide to drop so that we could safely cross. This is Jeff on his mighty Honda Dominator.
Once we had crossed the forth river, there were no major challenges other than picking lines across rocky benches.
Beach riding is not something I do regularly so it was a ton of fun to have wide open beach and a wide open throttle :)
Arriving at the Kahurangi Lighthouse.
Kahurangi Lighthouse.
Epic rock formations!
A number of sand cutaways made for some interesting riding.
After a magic day of riding, we made our way to a Department of Conservation house available for public use. This was a brilliant place to stay.
The next morning we started making our way back up the beach, aiming to hit the rivers at low tide again.
Steeper than it looks!
In this section we used a bush track instead of the shoreline. There were some pretty epic views to be had.
We were a tad too early for low tide so we parked the bikes up and had a bit of an explore on foot.
Once the tide dropped low enough, we were off again.
Jeff crossing one of the rivers out by the breakers for a nice shallow path.
We then arrived at a place we had all been really looking forward to; the sand bowl. There are very few places in the South Island offering sand riding so this was a great playground!
After a good play in the sand, we were off again.
Getting near the end of the day, Jeff and Nigel shot off home and we grabbed some fresh water to make camp nearby.
We didn't make as much ground as what we had hoped on day 3 so we were left with over 600 km to cover on the final day. A local cop having a good look at us while he drove past.
We could not have asked for better weather, it was brilliant!
Shadows were starting to get long and we still had another 300 km to go. The remainder of the trip was a tad chilly as we rode through Kaikoura in the dark and stopped for what felt like 5,000 roadwork lollipop signs!! We finally arrived safely home around 10pm after a seriously epic four days. Roll on the next one…
