O here we go again!

Ohope – Opotiki – Opape

A really solid day of riding today clocking up another 55kms. The majority was on State Highway 35 which as we travel further out east the traffic is certainly thinning out. We have been warned by friends, and strangers alike, to be aware of the logging trucks on this road. There are many, but at the moment we seem to be travelling against the fully loaded trucks that are en route from Hicks Bay to Tauranga. It is the empty ones who are passing us on their return trip.

Coincidentally we met a logging truck driver on the Hauraki Rail Trail the other day while he was on a works Christmas Day out, and already we’ve met him twice on the road, waving and blowing his air horn at us!

Motu Dunes Trail

The last 10-12kms of today’s ride was out of Opotiki on the Motu Dunes Trail. Opotiki is the last biggish town we’ll see for a while so we stocked up on supplies. We had one of the best lunches of the trip so far at the Two Fish café, and we did some forward trip planning at the iSite office. We caught up with some of our Shola B&B business using the local library’s internet.

What a fantastic ride on trails and boardwalks through the sand dunes along the coast, but with a major design fault! Our touring bikes with their panniers would not fit through the access gateways. The gateways are designed to stop motorbikes and vehicles from accessing the trails, but boy did it make it hard work for us. We had to stop about a dozen times and lift the bikes over the gateways. We did get help on one occasion by two strapping Maori men who made it look easy!

By the time we rode into the little traditional Kiwi motor camp at Opape (NZ$20) we were cream crackered. The cold beers we’d carried from Opitiki were well shaken up, but all was not lost as once we had Olive pitched only metres from the sea, the campsite owner pulled up on his quad with a couple of ice cold ones for us. Time to relax, do a little drone practice on the deserted beach, and just enough phone signal to be able to ring Dad on his 94th birthday before crashing out under another starry night sky.