NZ Day 21 - Rest Day 2 (HA!)

After another lovely morning run around the lake (this time with Harald and Linda who slept through the last session), some of us we headed into town to go mountain biking.  While Jon, Andy, Alexa, Clare, Jo, Leo, Annabelle and I rode, Zali, Lyra and Jett went off to do historical and cultural learning with Paul and Tracy’s family.   

I’d been looking forward to riding for ages, but I sort of forgot how tough steep pinches and uphill riding is when you haven’t ridden for months - even if you are fairly fit otherwise! Jon and I rode together with one map between us - which Jon held on to as he could actually read the small writing - I just followed along.  Our plan was to ride mostly outwards and upwards for around 90 minutes, then turn around and take advantage of the mostly downhill riding on the way back.  The Redwoods area in Rotorua is made up of heaps of shortish trails (1-5kms) linked by forestry roads, so it takes a fair bit of map reading to get yourself around - also to add to the complications, most of the trails can only be ridden in one direction.  I should also mention that Jon didn’t have his mobile with him but we were planning to ride together so it wasn’t worth him driving 30 minutes to go and get it.

When we got going again we just had few more trails to do before we hit our turnaround point.  Just as we started down the 2nd last one, I noticed it was marked as an advanced trail - and since I had struggled a little with some of the harder intermediate stuff, I immediately bailed out and told Jon I’d meet him at the end of the trail where it popped out into the road - less than a kilometre away. We hastily agreed that to do this I’d just continue down the road we’d just left. Easy.  

So I pedalled down the road but the scenery didn’t make sense with what I’d seen on the map the last time I had looked over Jon’s shoulder.  After a few minutes I stopped and decided to ride back up the road to the last map board I’d seen just to check. Sure enough I needed to take a different road to meet Jon. I wasn’t sure if Jon would realise that, so I high tailed it out to where the track actually would come out. But he wasn’t there.  I waited around for a while, and called out his name but then I started to worry that as it had taken me a while to get to the right spot, that he’d maybe waited for me, then gone on ahead to wait at the end of the 2nd trail. So I took the 2nd trail and popped out 5 minutes later at a big forestry intersection in what felt like the middle of no-where. And there was no Jon either. Dang! I waited there for 15 or so minutes.  At this stage I had two problems - firstly, I couldn’t call him as he didn’t have his phone - I realised there was a chance he had noticed that I had gone down the wrong road and followed me down, or, he hadn’t noticed and had ridden on and I’d missed him. He could be anywhere. My other major problem was that I didn’t have a map, and I couldn’t find one online from my phone as they sell copies to raise funds for trail maintenance and keep them off the web.  There were also no signboards where I was. So I was lost. Double dang. After waiting for a long time I called Clare and she consulted her copy of the map and directed me onto a trail that would head partway towards home. About five minutes later she rang me to report that she’d found Jon, and that he HAD realised our first mistake (actually our first mistake was splitting up, our second mistake was sending me down the wrong road), and he’d gone off to look for me, but I’d realised the mistake earlier and fixed it so we missed each other. The upshot was that he was now back at the start of the trails, and I was miles away, without a map.  I followed a few trails that I knew would go vaguely in the right direction, then I accidentally took a longish detour through a submerged and muddy track and emerged onto a road with absolutely no idea of which way to go and pretty exhausted and fed up wiht the whole experience. Luckily I still had my life-line, so after another call to Clare, I was on track again and finally heading back to the bike hire place, where Jon and Andy had been waiting a while. Uff.   Always take a phone kids.  And a map.