New adventures

Over the past year or so, I’ve taken a break from writing about cycling but I haven't taken a break from cycling. And 2026 is shaping up to be an exciting year on the bike, with lots of new rides.

The year started in Auckland, with a big day out cycling around inner city bays and beaches and up three of the city’s volcanic peaks. Later, Chris and I returned to the South Island’s West Coast to revisit the West Coast Wilderness Trail and Kawatiri Coastal Trail.

Just to show that the world is indeed a village, the Canadian couple I showed around Christchurch a few years ago, Colleen and Ian, just happened to be visiting the West Coast at the exact same time as us. And they just happened to be cycling the same leg of the West Coast Wilderness Trail the same day as us, so we had a big day out together.

But these were just warm-up rides for our big summer adventure.

After last year's self-supported South Island Tour Aotearoa trip, we were keen to do something similar. So, we looked into the Sounds to Sounds and Kōpiko Aotearoa bikepacking routes.

Sounds to Sounds starts in the Marlborough Sounds at the top of the South Island and makes its way south to Milford Sound. It's a 1,500 km journey over some fairly challenging terrain. Kōpiko runs from one side of the North Island to the other - from East Cape north of Gisborne to Cape Egmont near New Plymouth. Like the Sounds to Sounds, it traverses some remote countryside (over 1,070 kilometres) and is not an easy ride.

Aspects of both rides appealed to us, and we also wanted to do some of the Great Rides in the central North Island that we hadn't had a chance to try yet.1 We didn't have time to do it all, so we cobbled together our own route to take in the bits we most wanted to cover.

We decided to start our ride part-way along the Kōpiko route in the middle of the North Island, in Rotorua, and then cycle through to New Plymouth, deviating from the route to spend a few days mountain biking in Taupō. This allowed us to cycle Rotorua’s Whakarewarewa Forest Loop and Taupō’s Great Lake Trail, before heading for the Timber Trail and on to New Plymouth via the Forgotten Highway heartland ride.2

To add an extra challenge, we decided to bike to Christchurch airport to catch our flights and then dissemble and box up our bikes ourselves. On arrival in Rotorua, we simply had to put everything back together again and carry on our way.

We took the same approach for the second leg of our trip. After a rest day in New Plymouth, we cycled to the airport for our flight to Blenheim, where we joined the Sounds to Sounds route. While the route starts in Picton and we would have loved to cycle the Queen Charlotte Track (or at least the less demanding gravel road that much of Sounds to Sounds actually follows), we simply didn't have time. We’ve cycled some of it before and will find our way back there again.

From Blenheim, we more or less stuck to the Sounds to Sounds route all the way home to Christchurch (saving the rest of the route to Milford Sound for another time). As with last year's Tour Aotearoa ride, we carried our own gear and organised accommodation ahead of time. As with last year's trip, we were pretty much exhausted by the end. Actually, this trip was more demanding, with a lot more climbing. Over two weeks, we cycled roughly 1,000 kilometres and climbed more than 13,000 metres.

But wait, there’s more. Next month, Chris and I are visiting Japan where we will join a cycle tour of Kyushu. We will start in Fukuoka and end up in Kumamoto - yes, the place that had a big earthquake last month. At this stage, it looks like our tour will be unaffected and we have fingers crossed for no major aftershocks to upset our plans. (We’ve been that, done that and have no desire to go through it again.)

This tour is a bit different from others we've done because we’ll be on road bikes rather than mountain bikes or hybrids. It’s mountainous country with lots of climbing, and we’ll be on sealed roads the whole way, so road bikes make more sense for this trip.

Happily, it's given us a good excuse to finally buy the gravel bikes we’ve been wanting so we can get used to a more aggressive style of riding. (Gravel bikes are essentially road bikes with wider tyres.) We have been training all winter, and enjoying going sooo much faster. I try to take time to smell the roses when I'm cycling but, ultimately, I like going fast.

From next week, I am returning to fortnightly posts. If you're interested in hearing more about these rides (and are still subscribed), you’ll automatically get emails from me. But if you’ve been enjoying one less email in your inbox, now would be the time to unsubscribe!

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