Waiting For The Day That I Can Spread My Wings And Fly Away Again

From Kaiteriteri to Auckland (09/03 – 20/03)

I lay awake all night, listening to the rain pouring down on my tent and watching how the corners filled up with water throughout. I made a mental note to replace it as soon as I could – as I had done on numerous occasions before – only to dismiss the idea again when I got out of my tent to clearing skies. I had to pack up rather quickly, because I wanted to catch the water-taxi to take me to the northernmost point of Abel Tasman National Park, Totaranui. I had breakfast with Laure and we said our – this time final – goodbyes. She left me her book, Dostojevski’s “The Idiot”, which she had finished by now, to make my luggage heavier still. I didn’t mind, because it is a meaningful souvenir. It seems that sometimes, memories do come with more weight attached to them than you’d expect. I wasn’t alone for too long though. I stood on the beach, waiting for the Sea Shuttle to arrive when 2 cyclists pulled up next to me. By this time, I probably had met or heard of every other cyclist currently present on the South Island, so I wasn’t all that surprised to recognise Inger and Christa. We had first met in Curio Bay, on the south coast, but were cycling in opposite directions at that time. We had said we might meet again at Abel Tasman, and here we were. I had left my bike in the camping’s garage, but tough as they were, Inger and Christa took their bikes and gear on the boat with them, to circumvent the national park, rather than walk through as I was going to do.

I caught up with each other’s stories on the 2-hour boat trip to Totaranui and we had lunch together before going our separate ways. Having taken our time, I was probably the last boat passenger to get the walking underway that afternoon, which meant I had the perfectly well-maintained track – this is another one of New Zealand’s Great Walks – all to myself. The trail follows the beautiful coastline, leading from one heavenly peaceful beach to the next, climbing over gentle hills covered with a lush, subtropical native forest, home to a wide range of birdlife, its numbers growing again thanks to the country’s conservation efforts in recent years.

A fun element of this hike is the number of bays you can only cross during low tide. Most of them have longer high-tide alternatives, but the one at Awaora doesn’t. By the time I got there, low tide was approaching and I found a dozen people waiting for the water to get down as much as possible. Other hikers were already crossing, but however long you waited, wet feet were inevitable. I took off my shoes and carefully waded through the retreating sea, which had a stronger current than visually noticeable.

I continued a while longer and set up my tent on the next beach’s campground, Onetahuti. Even in low season, you need to book a tent spot in advance. I socialised with Kylie & Tommy, a British-Kiwi couple from Napier, who had given up their jobs to travel around, for “as long as possible”, taking things slowly. Their backpacks certainly slowed them down alright, since they carried 16 and 22 kilos respectively. It didn’t tamper their good mood, nor their sense of wonder. I have to admit, it was a gorgeous spot. And it kept its most enchanting revelation for the next morning.

I continued on the trail south, but I didn’t have it all to myself today. I reached Anchorage, where I hopped on the water-taxi again to take me back to Kaiteriteri. I was reunited with my bike and started out on the Great Taste Trail the next morning. This fairly easy mountain bike trail led me along the north coast, over Rabbit Island, around Waimea Inlet to Nelson. The main road is very busy on this section, so I didn’t mind the dirt road, nor the minor detour it made to get me to Bridge Backpackers in the centre of Nelson.

I was very close to leaving the south island behind, and crossing the Cook Straight to Wellington. The stretch of road connecting Nelson to Picton is one of the worse for cyclists though – a narrow, winding road, saturated with heavy traffic – and several people had advised against riding this section. It was a good 100km, so I decided to take the early bus in Nelson, enabling me to catch the ferry in the afternoon and gaining a day in the process. There were at least 10 other cyclists making the passage on the same boat as I was, and I recognised a German couple I had met 2 weeks earlier, at Boundary Creek campground.

Global News had been dominated by the COVID-19 outbreak for a couple of days now. The virus had surfaced in China around the turn of the year but had started to spread on a much larger scale, especially in Europe, in recent days. During the 4 hour crossing, I checked the latest on my phone and learned that Donald Trump had just imposed a travel ban on all air traffic coming from Europe for at least a month. My future travel plans to the US weren’t impacted, but my family had arranged to meet me in San Francisco in three weeks’ time before I would embark on my cross-country ride. I had been looking forward a lot to having my parents and brothers and sisters around for a couple of days and the prospect of not seeing them until my return to Europe in Autumn left me with a surging feeling of loneliness. Despite the fact that I hadn’t planned for being alone down here, being on my own had not bothered me until now, but all of a sudden October seemed so far away.

Lucky as I am, I didn’t have the time to dwell on it for too long, because I had a reception committee waiting for me on the quay. I had first met Fabian and Inka in Compiègne, not far north of Paris, on a late-June afternoon in 2017 when Liesbeth and I were making our way back to Brussels on our bicycles. They were going in the same direction and we cycled together for several days. We learned they had left their home city of Wellington, New Zealand, after graduating from high school to cycle around Europe for 8 months or so. At the time, we had admired them for their courage to undertake such a journey at the age of 18 and found them quite capable of carrying interesting conversations on a wide range of subjects. Their families had generously offered to host me upon learning about my travel plans and seemingly effortlessly, we picked up our conversations and discussions where we had left them almost 3 years ago, this time not around a cooking stove on the forest floor, but in a downtown Wellington pub with local craft beer. They knew how to take care of me alright. Fabian took me to Wellington’s first wind turbine the next morning for a full view over the city, the bay and its surrounding hills, before joining Inka down at the waterfront to make the most of a sunny day and cycle around almost all of Wellington’s coastline.

After staying for 2 nights at his parents’ house, Fabian also guided me to Inka’s house, 35km north of Wellington. The spoiling went on and before saying our goodbyes, I was treated to a delicious Sunday morning breakfast in Whitby. Inka and Fabian rode out of town together with me, before I started to climb the gentle, but beautiful Moonshine Road towards Lower Hutt. It had been wonderful to see them both again, and their friendship and hospitality at that moment in particular had meant a great deal to me, even though they probably did not fully realise that themselves.

Aside from being perfect hosts, they had also helped me plan my round trip of the north island. As a result, I followed the Remutaka trail, an old railway line converted to an easygoing mountain bike track, and continued on to Route 52, an all but deserted secondary road linking the remote south-eastern part of the island to the bigger cities at both ends, Masterton and Hastings – 256km apart. The north island is more populated than the south one, despite its smaller surface. I expected to see more people, not less, but this part of the country felt as deserted as any other part I cycled through until now. I spent the first night on Route 52 in Alfredton, on the Domain – these are common rest areas in town all across New Zealand, where travellers can sit down and very often even camp for free – and in spite of having a school next door, I felt like the only living soul around, apart for the sheep. There was no phone coverage and I didn’t meet anybody on my way to Pongaroa the next day.

It was in the midst of this remoteness, that it started to dawn on me that my whole plan was disintegrating and that I hadn’t seen it coming. At least not this fast and certainly not with such crushing consequences. I should have. China had been closed off from the rest of the world weeks ago, but that didn’t prevent a creeping spread of the feared COVID-19 coronavirus. Days ago it had already become clear Europe wouldn’t be able to contain the disease. The cases were soaring in Italy in particular and it didn’t take long for people to start dying from it in ever larger numbers. I remembered listening to a podcast about a Washington State retirement home being quarantined because several inhabitants had contracted the virus, before even leaving the south island. Belgium was about to enter a three-week lockdown, with all but the truly essential suspended in a bid to “flatten the curve”. It wasn’t about containment anymore, it was already about mitigation, with the underlying implication that COVID-19’s global presence wasn’t just going to disappear anytime soon. My slow grasping of the situation was probably induced by New Zealand being relatively unaffected in the first weeks of the pandemic. It hadn’t closed its borders, and the number of confirmed cases didn’t grow beyond 6 for several days, but the government imposed all people coming into the country to self-isolate for 2 weeks after their arrival nevertheless. Trump had extended the travel ban for the EU to a much larger number of countries, including Australia – where I was supposed to transit on my way to San Francisco. It was only when California announced measures of so-called social distancing – which I prefer to call physical distancing, but that’s not really important in this context – that I realised I might have to change my travel plans. My first thought was to delay my Pacific crossing and stay in New Zealand a little longer, relatively unaffected by events elsewhere, and wait for the situation to normalise. Three weeks delay wasn’t the end of the world after all; I would still have enough time to complete my cross country ride in the States.

I was sitting in the Pongaroa Hotel bar, sipping at a cappuccino and watching the local youth drinking and pooling away the emptiness of the afternoon, when this train of thought was blown to pieces. I made use of the local wifi network to make up for the absent phone coverage and read the advice of New Zealand’s minister of foreign affairs for Kiwi’s abroad, urging them to come home “now that commercial flights are still operating”. According to his assessment, there wouldn’t be a single plane in the skies by the end of the month. What was he talking about? At the same time, I opened the reply from the Belgian Consulate in Auckland to my inquiries regarding the official position of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at home. To my surprise, it was the Honorary Consul herself answering my question and the response was much more outspoken than I had expected. Her advise was to get home as soon as I could, with minimal stopovers, because in spite of the general uncertainty at a great many things, “what we do know, is that it will get worse before it gets better”.

I didn’t make any rash decisions and just got on my bike again, but when thinking everything through on my way to Wimbledon, it felt like the fog had cleared in my mind. New Zealand wouldn’t get off the hook. Staying here meant I would need to go into some sort of lockdown at some point in the future. What does that imply for a lonely cyclist? Living in his leaking tent in a forest for weeks on end? Being forced to rely on the kindness and hospitality of strangers? And what did I expect to find in the US, if in some magical way I would be able to get there in spite of the growing number of travel restrictions? Absence of testing induced experts to believe the US would be hit much harder than currently anticipated. I would find a country closed down to the strict necessities, in which it would be selfish, irresponsible and probably all but impossible to cycle. I wouldn’t be able to meet anyone from the Laughing at my Nightmare community. Not only would physical distancing prohibit that, but suffering from a muscular disease such as SMA also turns you into an easy target for COVID-19, strengthening the need for self-isolation and rendering all contact with a travelling tourist not only dangerous but also irrelevant. That night, when I found myself listening to the rain once more, I knew it. There wasn’t much left for me here. There was nothing for me across the Pacific. It was over. It was time to go home.

The disappointment soon made way for a growing sense of urgency. I wouldn’t be the only one trying to get home and all flights would eventually remain grounded. Time was running out fast. I needed to get to Auckland as soon as I could, and I was still in the middle of nowhere. I had always expected my last day of cycling to combine a sense of pride and accomplishment with a sadness all endings carry with them, but instead I had to get my head down and crank out 120km to get to Hastings in one day, in the meantime booking an expensive flight as well as a bus for the next morning to get me to Auckland on the other side of the island, arranging accommodation on the way and making sure I could get hold of a cardboard box to pack my bicycle and arrange transport for it to the airport. I have to admit, everything went very smoothly. I got to Auckland as expected, my bike box was waiting for me at the store I had called in advance and my airport shuttle got me and my bike to the airport with plenty of time to spare before boarding time.

Flight EK449 to Dubai took off on Friday, March 20th, at 9.15 pm, as scheduled. I expected to feel relieved because a full lockdown of the country could have caught up with me between Tuesday night when I decided to go home, and Friday, but once the sense of urgency had disappeared, the disappointment returned. And it brought with it a feeling of doubt: did I make the right decision? What if there wouldn’t be a lockdown after all? Was rushing home really the best option I had?

With the benefit of hindsight, it probably was. New Zealand closed its borders a couple of days after I left, and several people whom I had met along the way and who featured in previous episodes of this blog, found themselves stuck in some part of the country, just as many others across the globe in an almost worldwide lockdown. The flight route I took, over Dubai to Brussels, was deemed one of the last relatively safe trajectories but was closed down as well less than a week after my journey home. Measures of physical distancing were prolonged all over the world and with it came the realisation that things wouldn’t go back to pre-COVID-19-normal for quite some time.

I am still disappointed for having given up on something that was more than a holiday to me, more even than a long journey away from home. It had started out as a dream almost 10 years ago and evolved to a very tangible and personal project over the last months. It had been inflated by strong emotions I still need to come to terms with and I am convinced there wouldn’t have been a better place or a more purposeful way for me to do so. But I know I’m lucky. People have lost their jobs. I didn’t. People have been put on spare hospital beds in a hallway, needing intensive medical treatment, fearing for their lives, amidst total chaos. I didn’t. People have lost loved ones. I didn’t. On the contrary. I have returned to the people I love most, my family, and I wake up to their presence every day. I will continue to do so for the foreseeable future since the lockdown is still in place at the time of writing. Being far apart makes you realise how much you treasure someone. In spite of the simmering disappointment, I remember that every day. Being forced to spend time with them isn’t the worse that could have happened to me. It puts a smile on my face every single day.

Thanks for sticking around and reading this blog all the way to its premature end, even though I prefer not to see it that way. I don’t know where these uncharted territories will take us, so let me just say this:

TO BE CONTINUED…