Jan 9th

Took a ferry across Auckland harbour, cycled to the train station at Newmarket and then a train into the outer suburbs of Auckland at Papakura. Had great difficulty in manhandling the bike up and down the station steps but station staff happy to help and in fact our abiding memory of the first day is the friendliness of everyone - perhaps the best advertisement of NZ is the people themselves. Eventually got cycling and soon discovered that what I had thought was Highway 1 was in fact a motorway and cycles are banned! We ended up doing a massive detour of at least 20 miles. During this first day 3 men stopped their cars and waved us down - the first to show us the alternative way to go now we had left the motorway and the other 2 men just to find out who we were and where we were going. The tandem is like being accompanied by a dog or small child as people seem to feel happy to speak - it opens many doors.
Having left the sprawling suburbs of Auckland we were able to observe the countryside and the impression is of a rural landscape but with plants and trees one would associate with the tropics such as giant ferns, and palm trees.
My failure in  not allowing us  sufficient time to recover from the long-flight soon became all too apparent - firstly Linda was ready to give up, but then she says this at the beginning of every long trip. I had been asking her for months whether she was getting fit, but in the end it was my body that failed quite dramatically as I kept getting cramp in my lower thighs, on one occasion in both legs at the same time.The problem made the more difficult in that I had to get off the bike in order to stretch to stop the cramp but the pain was so bad that I could not get off the bike in order to do so! When I did manage to get off the bike and this happened on numerous occasions over the last 2 hours of our ride I had Linda giving me instructions as to how to alleviate my discomfort and on one occasion when I was not responding in the way she thought appropriate said quite quietly but loud enough for me to hear ' be a man'. This from the person who when I came home from work some years ago complaining I was suffering from the flu said ' don't bother me I only deal with very sick people'!
Thus we were both suffering from the 'bonk' - a technical term used by cyclists to signify total exhaustion - a term not to be confused with bonking, which at the time was too hard to comtemplate let along undertake. Finally we got to our first night's accomodation at Jonio's Olive Farm and had a great welcome and were given a basket of food to cook as the local restaurants were all closed as we had arrived after 8pm. The farmer couldn't remember if we had paid so had to ask if we knew! We enjoyed a beautiful room set in the olive groves and Linda cooked some spaghetti - we had a definite need for carbohydrate loading before tomorrow's ride.