Deer Park

We stayed in Mangonui for a week. It was a great week. We immediately met some locals to hang out with and found a great cabin which was a short stagger from the pub

A fishing village with a good waterfront for walking

And after a couple of days there was a hunting/fishing competition for the locals.

The rules were two guys take off in a 4X4 with two dogs for two days. The trucks were loaded up with rifles, fishing rods, ammo, booze and a couple of things I probably shouldn’t blog about.

The object is to come back with the biggest pig, the biggest snapper and the pheasant with the longest tail feathers. There’s a formula combining these somehow arriving at a cumulative score.

Kiwis are really big pig hunters. They have multiple magazines devoted to it. Here’s one, not bad for a first pig.

Bye the way, that’s the correct way to carry a pig. You see Kiwis carrying pigs like this all the time.

And another, sometimes you just get lucky

The trucks they set off in, with the dogs

The hunters all wear wellies. Everyone in NZ wears wellies. Or flip flops

The professionals

Give them another twenty years

Then two days later they all come back. They’ve gutted the pigs in the field but they get sliced up further here to check for cheat-rocks before the weigh-in.

I’ll spare you the fun gory stuff. Here are the winningest pigs

And the winningest snappers

And the pheasant

The guys who didn’t make the finals with their smaller trophies at their feet

It all looked like this. The measurers and judges wore orange Hawaiian shirts

Later, at the pub, they gave out prizes and got drunk. It was awesome. My new friend Philip and I entertain the local ladies

A few days later we head up to 90 mile beach.

I’ve been looking forward to this for a while. Actually it’s 56 miles though according to the GPS and the odometer on my bike. The reason they says it’s 90 miles is because it takes a horse, which can walk 30 miles in a day, 3 days to walk it, but the horses go slower in sand. This has been explained to me numerous times. OK then, 90 miles it is

The Google Earth. This is the northern tip of NZ

G Earth of the beach

The start of the ride is about 40 minutes from Mangonui, down a short sand road

Dunes to the right

Surf to the left. Heaven

Off up the beach. pics from video.

Dry

Wet

Both

2/3rds the way up is the only course change, rounding a small point. Riding through the surf here in places

You have to ride it at low tide. But since high tide was at 11:30 am, that wasn’t happening. So we started at 2:30 pm with the ebb.

It was pretty firm and in places, where it was flatter, wet. So we pressure washed Lucinda afterwards to get the salt off.

You could go as fast as you liked so we settled in at a relaxed 60 mph and stopped for photos and to watch and listen to the surf.

At the northern end the idea is to ride a stream bed east to the main highway, about 4K away. But with all the rain it wasn’t a stream bed, it was a river. The banks were soft and slow going to we stayed mid-channel, but it got deep and fast flowing after maybe 500 yards. Looking ahead I could see higher dunes and wondered if the river narrowed to Lucinda drowning depth. With sunset only a couple of hours away, we did an exciting 180 mid-river and rode back to the beach, then did the 56 90 56 miles of sand again. It was dark by the time we rode into Magonui.

Going upstream, from video

A vanity shot coming back, with a storm cloud coming in

After a couple more days in Mangonui we rode back to Auckland.