What a great but challenging day! Up at 0600 for a 7am departure. Where we stayed there was a bike room, a huge sitting room and an amazing kitchen….fully stocked. So much easier to have an early start when there isn’t a wet tent to dry out before packing it away!
We were right by the lake…so beautiful. The first 10km were on a mountain bike trail right by the river….i had to walk a lot of it because I’m so heavily loaded.
Then there was about 15 km of pavement….then more trail that was really rough. Once again pushed my bike a lot through this section. Thankfully it was al nice day…and the trees provided a lot of nice shade.
Photo checkpoint #8 Centre of the north island
The geographical centre of the north island was first located in 1961 by John Wheeler, a land surveyor from Taupō. A cairn marks the spot. He created a roughly one meter long map of the North Island on some rigid cardboard, accounting for the curvature of the earth. The point where it perfectly balanced on a pin was defined to be the geographic centre.
After this was another 10 km of gravel road. Three people were helicoptered from this area two days ago…so I was being extra careful. Eventually I made it to the campground where Elizabeth and I rented bunks inside for another early start tomorrow morning. We need to make it roughly 100km to where there is both lodging and food.
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