Chris and Mon’s Excellent Adventure

This Easter weekend Chris and I took our awesome kick ass tricked up adventure bike on a truly excellent adventure.
We started off by loading it on to the trailer with Chris’s parents bikes, and headed to my parents in Taumarunui where we would start our ride the next day. Last time we did this ride, we stole Sprocket’s bed (Sprocket is our really hard core dog) and velcro’d it to the back seat, along with carefully cut camping bed mats. Along with the pack rack that we’d half stolen, half temporarily been lended by Chris’s dad, we had a sweet ride – my ass lasted 5 hours!! However, Chris had forgotten the set up, left it at home, so we stopped at the Te Kuiti Warehouse and got a sweet deal on a returned goods sheepskin for $28.99 and a camping mat for $8.99...

Chris set to work on pimping my seat on Friday morning, then we got off to a leisurely start after my mum kindly made us all tea and porridge, and headed off to start the 42nd Traverse from Owhango. Chris and I had done this ride over Christmas and thought it would be nice to bring his parents along, followed by Fishers Track.
So off we went, and took a detour off the 42nd to see where it would take us. Pretty fun, two up on our machine, through bogs, ruts and hills that made me cling on (nothing compared to what was coming the next day though ...). Stopped for a crème egg rest ... and wondered where Jo was.  She came along about 5 minutes later, just as we were going to go find her. She’d clipped a tree with her handlebar and her thumb was looking pretty nasty. But she is such a trouper, so hard core, I gave her some drugs, Chris gave her magic cream, and away we went.

The 42nd Traverse runs from Owhango to National Park, and took about 3 hours to do when you take side routes. It’ver very remote and has beautiful scenery – a kiwi classic route. It was pretty busy over Easter so we had to take a bit of caution. Everyone was enjoying it (except some grumpy mole in a 4WD part way through – hope she has cheered up by now!!) and  was great to see families and couples out and about.

We reached the end of the track in good time, and headed for lunch at The Chateau – well, not actually The Chateau, the cheaper cafe on the other side of the road! We still had Fishers Track to complete, so we made tracks for that. Fishers Track is a bit more hardcore than the 42nd, and quite a lot of bogs and ruts – Chris decided to bury our bike in a particularly deep bog! More amazing views, really stunning back country and farms, just beautiful. We are so lucky to live in a country that has so much to offer, all the price of a tank of gas! Perhaps this is a good spot to mention that we had a 5 litre gas tank taking up half of our pack, and this was good because we could go a little bit further... but bad because man did I stink by the end of the weekend, haha!

We finished Fishers Track (takes about hour and a half) and then headed back to my parents, through the back roads to Raurimu and home for a cup of tea. And homemade coconut loaf by Mum Brady.

On Saturday we met up with two mates from Auckland on their road bikes and tried to formulate a plan. We agreed we would meet in Marokopa, which is on the west coast, about level with Te Kuiti.

So off we went, me and Chris determined to find dirt roads to adventure on. We took the turn off to Aria (Chris was stoked this was a dirt road) and I was in charge of our high tech navigation system (maps photocopied at work, carefully folded / scrumpled and held up half underneath the straps on Chris’s back pack – GPS, pah!).  At Piopio (look it up on Google maps) there was a sign to a waterfall 23kms away, so we decided to follow that. A hidden waterfall was lovely – but to be honest, even though the road wasn’t gravel, the scenery again was outstanding. At times it was almost like the South Island, we must have been a valley, it was splendid, with all these odd rock formations that look like 1600 / 1700 housing foundations!

After the waterfall we thought righto, better get to Marokopa to meet our mates for lunch. But lo and behold – there’s some arrows! And tracks! And open gates! And ‘this is where the away check for the Oparau endure was’ from Chris! Few minutes later we came cross two guys who had run out of petrol – so we gave them a bit of ours and carried on ... right to the fuel dump for the trail ride that was on!

Picture this ... our amazing adventure bike, with me and my pink helmet on, my sheepskin rug as a seat, and a pack on the back, and we rock up and ask if we could do the second half of the trail ride. Chris nearly had a ‘do you know who I am’ moment when the guys said perhaps he should leave his wife behind, they’d take me to the end and he could pick me up there, it was quite steep and hard, very tricky, are we sure we want to do this. To their credit, they really made sure we knew what we were getting into. Off we went with a ‘she’ll be right’ attitude, no doubt leaving everyone there thinking ‘what a pack of ....’

MAN!!! That was SOO much fun! Some gnarly hills, up and down, loads of squealing as I thought we would topple over, passing all the quads on the track, through slippery clay, massive climbs to the top of the hills and all the way back to the bottom again... It was probably the closest I will come to racing with Chris, and it was awesome. For those of you who don’t know, turns out he is pretty handy on a motorbike. So to the farmer who we gave some gas – yes, he does know how to fill up his bike cheers!

We came to the end of the trail ride, after getting many strange looks – and some congratulations when they realised we’d just ridden 40kms of the trail ride! Another crème egg stop, and decided to take the road to Waitomo. Hmm – 52 kms – can we do that with not much gas?? We did, even though we got on to reserve. But you know, there are no gas stations in Waitomo! So we resorted to more good old kiwi classic behaviour and flagged down the next car and trailer combo that had obviously come from the trail ride and begged nicely for some petrol. They were so impressed by our efforts that they gave us their leftover petrol – thank you kind sirs! – which took us to Otorohanga, then Te Awamutu.

What a weekend! The next day we pretty much hightailed the back roads to Pukekohe. Hightailed apart from the cattle stop (actual cattle stop – cows on the road, so Chris and me rounded them up to help the farmer!).  Stopped in at the BMX nationals, where I decided our kids would not ever ride BMX but Chris said it would harden them up ... and then home! By then, both our bums were so ready for a proper seat – even with all the pimping, you can still only do so much on a wooden seat! On the plus side, it made my little Starlet feel extremely smooth and quiet!

Overall, a fantastic weekend had by Chris and me. It goes to show that you don’t need to spend heaps on a bike and the accessories, you just need a good pillion passenger and a great sense of adventure!

PS – turns out Jo’s thumb is broken, and she rode 4 hours with it that way. Yeah, so think about that next time you claim your bruise / bump / scrape stopped your ride!!

Well it was definitely a toughy! The mornings five and a half hour qualifier went pretty well apart from when I had the stupidest crash possible when I hit a fence and ended up face first in a icy puddle. The course was technical and muddy after plenty of rain the day before and you needed to stay focussed the whole way especially in the treacherous snow and ice sections. I qualified 6th which gave me  a pretty good starting position for the afternoon's elimination race.

The afternoon race was pretty ugly, to be honest I think it was too difficult as this sport is supposed to be extreme enduro, not high speed trials. Several other riders shared this opinion including Taddy Blazusiak who crashed out early on. I had a tough first half lap with a bit of arm pump and a lot of riders bouncing around the place. I was in 6th place but eventually found some rhythm and a bit more pace. The course was really intense - to put it into context there was stuff that you would not put into a NZ national trials competition. One piece in particular was a completely unrideable waterfall and had a queue of riders lining up to get dragged up by ropes.

I got pulled out of the race 3/4 of the way through lap two after working my way up to fourth overall behind three ex world trials riders, Grahame Jarvis in 1st, Dougie Lampkin 2nd and Andreas Lettenbichler 3rd. It looked like there would only be two finishers. So whilst I am disappointed not to have made it to the finish line, for someone with modest trials skills fourth place is pretty sweet.

Fellow Kiwi Rory Mead had a tough time and was unable to qualify.

I'm now off to Florence for sight seeing on the way to Wales for the Tough One on 20th February - should be enough time to recover!

I arrived in Milan airport totally knackered after too much time in airplanes. The flight was pretty uneventful apart from the ever increasing security checks when flying through the USA, the terrorists would be proud to see the amount of change they have triggered. To board my plane to LA I had my passport and ticket checked four times, I was X rayed, I was patted down twice, I had my hand luggage swabbed for explosive residues, I had every single item taken out of my carry on bag and inspected and every pocket explored, laptop out and opened up and my shoes inspected. I don’t begrudge the checks, it’s just interesting to see the change one.

I’m teamed up with South Africans Darryl Curtis and Riaan van Niekerk for this trip and yesterday we spent the day at KTM Italy prepping our new KTM 300’s. It’s an impressive work shop with more world championship winning bikes coming out of here than anywhere else. All the factory enduro bikes are built here and most of them are here for us to drool over. It’s a very humbling place to be, the amount of knowledge the mechanics have about building fast bikes is truly incredible. Taddy Blazuziak’s mechanic is also prepping Taddys bike here and that thing is a piece of art. Its over ten kg lighter than a standard kick start 250exc, that’s 10% lighter!! The sub frame is beautiful, its hand fabricated out of titanium and I can’t stop looking at it! The suspension feels amazing and I can’t imagine what it must be like to ride something so personalised and so focused.

Last night we went to dinner with the legend that is Giovanni Sala and his mechanic of five years Lucca. Multi time world enduro champion, Sala is one of the true greats of the sport and a really nice guy as well. Currently he travels ahead of the World Enduro Championship inspecting the course and using his years of experience to help make the courses and the events closer to perfect. He is a true Italian, loves his life, talks flat out and drives like a lunatic!

Today the plan is to finish off doing what we can to the bikes and then head out to the race sight for hells gate so we have time to do some walking and get a feel for the place. It’s going to be plenty cold up there as it only got to about eight degrees here in Bergamo, might be time to break out the Red Bands!

Round one – National Enduro, Oparau

After last year’s less than perfect start of the season at the same venue, I was determined to go back this year and conquer Oparau once and for all. This year the Junior class raced first so the seniors started at midday, without having to worry about the track being too overcrowded.

The track was about 150kms, with 5 special tests, three times around the MX style test and twice around the bush test – each one was raced blind in the first lap. I raced well throughout the day with only one real problem – I drowned my bike by riding in the wrong part of the stream... Luckily, I’ve had a bit of practice down in the South Island on training weeks getting water out of motorbikes, so I was able to fix the problem in under 7 minutes, and get to the check right on my minute (disturbing my wife’s thus far peaceful day in the hammock). After this not-quite-setback I was really focussed and got through the rest of the day unscathed, to take the overall win by 22 seconds.

The KTM300 performed brilliantly even after the drowning, and was obviously the weapon of choice as Jason Davis came 2^nd overall on the same bike.

No Way in Hell Extreme Enduro

The Sunday after the first round of the National Enduro champs was the first ‘No Way In Hell’ extreme enduro. I was really looking forward to this as this is what I am really into at the moment with the World Extreme Enduro Champs having their trial year in 2010.

After a stunning hot muggy day on Saturday, we all woke up to rain on Sunday. I thought that this might cull the entries to about 20, but there was 80 entrants.

The Ironmen started first, and I got a great start off the line – and went on to lead all day, extending my lead from 10 minutes at the first main spectator point to around 2 and a half hours over Mitchell Neild who came in second. The track was great, I was fortunate to lead as the ground was really soft and so I no doubt threw in quite a few extra deep ruts for the rest of the competitors. There was a gnarly steep slippery grassy hill which someone told me I was the only one to get up in one go – and even then it took six minutes! Again, I was fortunate to get there before the rain really set in so I didn’t see it at its worst point. The race was very difficult, including parts where I had to walk the bike down the hills, long slippery rivers, and endless trails through the native bush.

I finished the race in 3 hrs 12 minutes, and caught the organisers a bit by surprise. Mitchell Neild finished second, and the remaining three finishers showed up 5 hours after me – Cam Smith, Adrian Smith, Mark Delatour. Really stoked to have won, my fitness is definitely at it’s peak, and I can’t wait to rip into Hell’s Gate in Italy on 6 February, followed by The Tough One in Wales on 20 February.