Travel - A bicycle trail for two

A biking holiday on the Otago Rail Trail that's all about pleasurable activity while meandering through sleepy towns and enjoying southern hospitality, by Jacquetta Bell
In the cafés of Ponsonby and even Parramatta they’re getting their tongues around the place names of Central Otago, as the anecdotes flow about the steep climb into Omakau, the cloud formation called the Taieri Pet, and the naughty dog Diesel at the Oturehua pub.

The Central Otago Rail Trail is as hot as a February night in Clyde and, having pedalled its 150km, I’m now a devotee, already planning my next trip.
I drove south in late January with mate and Arts Festival colleague Annabel Norman. We picked up the bikes from Trail Journeys in Clyde, and did the first leg on the harder option of the track alongside the Clutha. This is a dramatic start to the trip, riding in the shade of willows alongside the powerful turquoise waters of the river. Stocked up with muesli bars at the trail’s biggest town, Alexandra, our next stop was a swim at Galloway; then we pedalled onwards, growing in confidence as the gravel hummed under our tyres.

At Chatto Creek we struck the first of the old pubs, right alongside the old railway track and offering bike racks, hammocks, country sandwiches, and city coffees. Here began a conversational theme with locals – the welcome exceeds the usual southern hospitality and the revitalisation that cycling tourists have brought to small towns is acknowledged gratefully.

From here the track climbed, but even at its worst the gradient is only 1:50, the most the old steam trains could manage. Starting from Clyde or Middlemarch you have an equal climb to the highest point of 618m above sea level, but the Middlemarch route risks riding into a nor-wester. You can do the trail as a camper – carrying all your own gear, or opt for a guide, support van, plus all meals and accommodation. We went for something in between, so when we arrived at Omakau’s Tiger Hill Lodge our bags were there to meet us. Nice. Chatting to the owner, ‘farmer’s wife’ Gwenyth White, the conversational theme continues – the trail is a 21st century gold mine. She operates three lodges during the summer, not quite up to the scale of Lorraine who we meet the next night at Wedderburn, with a hillside of cottages at $75 a head. The new money earned by farmers’ wives must have seen a power shift in a few relationships around these parts – there’ll be no waiting for the wool cheque before the new lounge suite is ordered!

Day two on our bikes and we were grateful we’d done a few training runs around Nelson – the trail is not ‘hard out’ biking, but it’s not a doddle. We’re in the Ida Valley, made famous by poet Brian Turner and artist Graham Sydney – the skies are massive and bluer than borage flowers; the clouds are startlingly white and heaped like quilts above the timeless brown hills. Central Otago has a sense of place that is unique in New Zealand, bedded into the memory of those who love it with the dry scent of thyme and teasel. Brian Turner’s books are on sale at the historic Oturehua Store, alongside fat padded bike seats for those who didn’t do the prep. The store has become a tourist attraction by staying exactly as it was in the 1950s, with racks of cotton thread, bins of grain, and shelves of ancient tinned foods.

The next two days take us through art deco Ranfurly, past Waipiata, over viaducts, through tunnels, past some great swimming holes, and on to Hyde for our final night and best meal yet at the restored Otago Central Hotel, where they’ve also converted the local school into a restaurant and its pool into a barbecue pit – talk about social change.

Our last run, a short 29km downhill into Middlemarch, is into a cold southerly, but our spirits remain high. I am filled with admiration for DOC and the Rail Trail Trust – the people who pushed the cycle trail concept back in 1993 when the railway line closed. They removed tonnes of ballast to create an even cycling surface and installed heritage information panels in the red workmen’s sheds along the track. Hint: these are just big enough for two people to do yoga in to keep warm while waiting for the rain to stop. I feel nostalgia for childhood holidays in the region and proud of this wonderful country we call home. I’m on a high that might be a chemical my brain has rarely experienced before – endorphin.

If you like a holiday with a bit of action that shows you a part of the South Island you can’t really see any other way, and if you’d like to know more about a fascinating aspect of our past, I think the Central Otago Rail Trail is just the ticket.