Outdoors: Should be easy like a Sunday morning

By COLIN MOORE

Sunday is bicycle day. Step outside your door early enough and see a multicoloured horde flash past, three or four abreast, in a blur of spinning spokes and gaudy lycra.

You have to be quick because these sport cyclists are moving, although if you live near a hill you may see a few tailenders. And they are long gone, showered and with their feet up, out fishing or mowing the lawns, by the time the sun is at its zenith.

I have neither the lycra - at my age it is hardly becoming - nor the fitness to flash past anyone on a bicycle. But it is Sunday and those club cyclists provide the inspiration to get into the outdoors on two wheels.

The idea is to try something a bit different that might lead to, well, who knows? Maybe heading off for a cycle tour somewhere. A friend has just spent his summer holidays cycling from Singapore to Bangkok and he reckons it is one of the best trips he has done.

He's a veteran of cycling - through Europe, across America, around much of Australia and all of New Zealand. His Asian excursion was not only cheap but he didn't have to carry sleeping bag, tent or cookers; he slept and ate in local hotels and cafes for just a few dollars a day.

It is the sort of minimalist approach that advancing years find more appealing than the under-a-bridge-in-a-bivvy-sack days of old. Plan it right and you could surely cycle tour the Asian way here, using backpacker lodges and camping ground cabins.

It is with such musing that I pump up the tyres on a bike that hasn't been used since I decided to get fit by being a good dad and delivering my son's newspapers. That was a Sunday morning, too, but the cycling ended just 100m from home. The canvas bag holding the newspapers caught in the front spokes as I flashed down our hill leaving me with a broken collarbone, compression fracture of a vertabrae, and son to deliver his papers after all.

The bike has probably mended better than the rider. It is a hybrid, a cross between mountain and touring bike. The hybrids were briefly in fashion but like most compromise machines, never really caught on.

A shrewd marketing person would have come to that conclusion on the Hillary Commission's ill-fated Big Coast cycling events that were held in the 1990s. The events were two to three-day mountain bike rides where all your camping and sleeping gear was carried for you by truck and the catering was done by local groups as a fund-raising exercise.

The idea was to apply the sort of organisation and logistical support that is involved in multisport events, to a non-competitive, recreational event. A wonderful idea it was, too, or at least I thought so. The problem was that not enough other people did. Mountain bikers wanted more high-speed action and cycle tourists, even those riding aluminium bikes costing several thousand dollars, seemed reluctant to part with a reasonable amount of dollars for food and accommodation.

(I never cease to be bemused by the way so many outdoors folk leave their palatial urban homes, wine cellars and BMWs and as soon as they pull on a pair of tramping boots are horrified at spending a cent on the merest luxury.)

So while my hybrid bike was the perfect machine for the unsealed roads and farm paddocks of two Big Coasts on Waiheke Island, and another on Great Barrier Island, it was as commercially doomed as trying to run what amounted to a hybrid cycle tour.

Yet I am an eclectic sort and Sunday is a good day for hybridisation, to try something different. Outdoors buddy Joe Scott-Woods joins me on his son's mountain bike as we cycle off towards Kumeu in search of quiet country lanes, fresh air and perhaps a soothing swim somewhere.

It is soon obvious why those packs of multicoloured riders are up so early. By mid-morning these roads are as busy as weekday rush hour. There is not a lot of fresh air around and it is scarier than rock climbing without a belay.

A few years ago we woke up the chooks trundling kayaks down this road on a journey from the Waitemata Harbour to the Kaipara. We should have got up early for our cycle journey, too. The cars in a hurry include a number with mountain bikes on the roof, heading for a couple of hours of daredevilry in the Woodhill or Riverhead Forests.

Coming the other way is a continuous procession of those racing types, at least 100 in all, their Sunday outing of maybe 100km or more almost over.

They flash by all concentration but the cyclists in their ones or twos, out for a fitness pedal on an odd assortment of bikes, give a cheery wave.

When we leave Highway 16 at Waimauku and head up the Waikoukou Valley towards Kaukapakapa it should be more peaceful, except apparently this stretch of road has become a Helensville by-pass for motorists using the Highway 16 route north.

Peace almost prevails when we turn for Waitoki, although this is the road the folks in these parts use to get to Orewa and all places east,

At least it is lovely country, delightfully green rolling hills, little patches of bush and some rather swank lifestyler homes.

At last we find what we are looking for, peace and quiet on an unsealed and deserted road that skirts around the northern boundary of Riverhead Forest.

If not quite an English country lane, it is indeed pleasant so we find a shady spot and stop for lunch. Others must find it pleasant, too, because a couple of the houses going up in this area are monstrous.

It is actually hard to believe that we are so close to the country's largest city because from the brow of one small hill the 360 degree panorama reveals nothing but farmland and trees.

Sadly for us, it is an illusion. Just a few kilometres down this backcountry road we pass Drury Lane which is an apt, if somewhat amusing sign that we will soon be back in the hustle and bustle of the metropolis.

Busy Highway One from Dairy Flat through Albany to home is as much a trial of nerves as it is of body, and bottom, not used to cycling.

I guess we cycled about 80km, although I never bothered to add it up. More importantly, we learned that in future we had better follow the example of those mountain bikers and put our cycle on the car roof until we get to the peaceful, backcountry roads we seek.

* Reading: Cycling New Zealand, by Nicola Wells, Neil Irvine and Ian Duckworth, Lonely Planet; Classic New Zealand Mountain Bike Rides, Paul, Simon and Jonathan Kennett.

* Cycle Touring Company, ph (021) 2255 282, email info@cycletours.co.nz

Cycle Tours

* colinmoore@xtra.co.nz