Day 10 Part 4/6 Taumaranui to Pipiriki continued...
I blow out of National Park confident there is some easy running ahead. The bloody panniers play up again as I'm ripping along at 30 kmph. I coast to a halt just as the first 3 riders I see all day whizz past. Yes I'm ok I say and they don't miss a beat. I fiddle around and eventually get going. The road here is an optical illusion and feels as if you are going up when you are going down and vice versa, in places. In a heavy vehicle or a bike you can feel it because the engine begins to lug. I'm in the Grove dinging along at up to 30 kmph per hour. I cruise into the last spoke on the railways line connecting Auckland and Wellington and revolutionizing transport and take some arty photo of the steel viaduct and check out Smash Palace, immortalized in the movie with Bruno Lawrence in it. Health and Safety had done in the sign because it was deemed a H and S hazard and now had a weird P C name like the Historical Vehicle Museum. It is also the end point of a cycle trail from Ohakune.
My phone goes flat as I mount a post to snap thousands of white butterflies fluttery by a field of turnip or brassica. The lady in the info centre kindly lets me charge up so I buy 3 tea towels at $9 each which were $35 in Russell. I buy a banana milkshake and eat my two remaining sandwiches from lunch before they go off. It is blistering hot. The cars stop on the wrong side of the road or just double park. Three schoolboys examine the only tag in town, some faded nonsense on the Four Square. I sit across the road on a rock in the shade waiting for the last possible minute to retrieve the phone before she goes home. I was the only visitor all day she said as she mulled over what to do with a huge collection of serial photographs of farms- once a proud feature of every farm house wall. I spot the dinosaur museum in the old bank and stand in the middle of the road and do a left right north south photo shoot. A couple of cars roll quietly past but I don't move. Back on the bike and moving quietly along suddenly a car roars out the side street on my left. It was so lazy a moment earlier but she has seen me but is still gaining. I wobble and turn slowly to avoid her and she brakes and laughs hysterically.
Comedian. I photograph an awesome woodpile because who doesn't love one of them?
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