On Your Bike
Day after day in mid-February, scores of cyclists swarm down Ninety Mile Beach, from Cape Reinga towards Ahipara, along the west coast of the northern Far North. It’s hours of beautiful tedium, sand stretching into haze. They arrive hungry and bone-weary and make a beeline for food. “It’s like New Year’s,” the owner of the Ahipara fish and chip shop says. “Except none of you are drunk!” Within a month, most will have battled through headwinds, minor injuries and saddle soreness to arrive at the other end of the country, in Bluff, having travelled 3000 kilometres by bike.
This is the Tour Aotearoa, a two-yearly off-road cycle event — created as an antidote to the 2008 global financial crisis and ensuing recession — that might help carry us through the economic fallout of
