Cycling: 103km

After the completely clear skies of the day before I couldn't believe my eyes when we awoke to dark clouds and rain! Boo! After avoiding breakfast due to the Kiwi Experience whose patrons had apparently thrown a bomb in the kitchen we set off. I had got pretty soaked just putting our water bottles back on the bikes so we were anticipating a day of getting soaked.

Unbelievably this wasn't to be the case. The rain stopped just before we left and the roads were sufficiently dry that we didn't get too wet riding along. The skies never cleared all day but it didn't rain! Hurray!

We ate our breakfast on a bench outside the Woolworths in Otorohanga, but it was very cold so we decided we needed a constitutional pot of tea so set off to find the "Thirsty Weta". We were served by some friendly staff and drank lots of tea, sitting under a heater and read their papers for the grand sum of $3! What a total bargain.

Otorohanga was our departure point from SH3 and the traffic was immediately quieter. The heavens were just beginning to spit on us when we arrived in Pirongia so we pulled in to the first cafe we saw which was the Persimmon Tree Cafe. This was brilliant and a really nice surprise in a remote place such as this. Claire's soup even came with a free praying mantis! Just before we left we chatted to the owner who was a local and recommended a side route we had been considering. His declaration that it wasn't too hilly sold it to us!

So on that note we set off and turned onto the Te Pahu Road which undulated gently alongside the state highway for about 30km. The roads were good but quiet and not too hilly (apart from a ridiculously steep bit at the end!) which is perfect for us. We enjoyed a good hour and a half riding side by side chatting. This has been a rare occurence on the North Island simply because of the weight of traffic.

We finally reached the end of our quiet short-cut and turned West towards Raglan. At this point we also swung into the wind and the dipping sun which made for fairly tough conditions. People we'd chatted to in Otorohanga and the Persimmon Tree Cafe had told us about a "big" hill which wasn't on our profiles (we didn't have any for this particular section) so we were a little nervous. The climb must have been about 300m but with the wind it was quite long. It wasn't very steep luckily.

The final 15km of this long day were very undulating with some steep ascents and descents. The wind really made this hard and we were very relieved to drop down the final hill into Raglan. We arrived at our hostel pretty much at dusk and were relieved to find that this chilled out place lived up to its reputation. I was very tired so we nipped to the shop and bought some light food for dinner and went to bed nice and early.