Preparations: getting places and remembering we went there

Takapuna Beach, November 2012

Getting places
Our course is fairly well planned (more in a later post).  During the trip there are several key dates like getting admitted to the bar, job interviews, and a wedding that require our non-negotiable attendance (and given the Black Caps'recent series win over South Africa watching them play England in Napier has been hastily added to the bike trip agenda).  Accordingly we've had to be a little bit more rigid with dates than initially planned. Virg, who I cannot wait to meet because inter alia she endorsed my idea of glowsticks and sparklers at night on the trip, has been very cool with and accommodating about all these things.

There are going to be small stretches where we might bus either to avoid shitty traffic (Auckland) or loooooong stretches through hilly country (Te Ureweras, and not just because we want to avoid the terrorists ...). We're trying to keep bus trips to the very minimum, but (remembering that none of us are seasoned tourers), there are going to be places where it's inevitable due to timing or safety. Hopefully no bus ride will be longer than two hours and hopefully there will be no more than two or three bus rides.

In terms of navigation, a good old paper map of New Zealand will be the primary tool. I'm looking forward to marking off our location each night and seeing where in this country we've ended up that day. I have the googlemaps app on my phone to check our precise location and for any emergencies, but I would prefer to save the battery for picture-taking (more on that below). 

Remembering we went there

I've kept a journal in one form or another since I was a tween. Last summer I was lucky enough to travel with a dream team of friends through Southeast Asia, and while my journal keeping was more sporadic than it could have been, these words on their tattered pages are incredibly evocative for me:

Koh Samui is a glorious cesspit, frothing at the mouth with freedom, luring out the hedonist in you with a wink and the promise of obscene fun. Eat what you want, drink where you want, f*ck who you want - it doesn't matter amid all the pulsing. The city is labyrinthine. Streets are narrow, commerce crammed into every space. A young woman cooking road food sits on the dirty steps of a MacDonald's. A prostitute (wiggly hips, tiny shorts, gender indeterminate) saunters into a 7/11, joins a queue of three men. They're all out of this world high with eyes as large as saucers and one of them carries a full glass of what I think is whiskey in his right hand.

I'm aiming to say something, a paragraph or two or three, about every town we spend some time in on the bike trip, and my disordered scribblings will hopefully provide some fodder more interesting than "we're in Waihi, we had a flat tire on the way, we saw some mines, we left" for the blog. When Lee biked from Quebec through to San Francisco, he used a little yellow Rite in the Rain journal that is completely weatherproof (pages and all, provided you write in pencil), and he got me one for Christmas because he is awesome like that.

Although I can't claim any skill or knowledge other than pointing an iPhone at things, photographing the adventure is important to me. There's a balance to be struck between being present in the moment and wanting to capture the moment, and I'd like to strike it here. My iPhone is going to be riding up front with me (on a weatherproof bike mount I can't find the link to but which allows you to use the touch screen through the casing) and it will be the only "real" camera I take. I'm also going to grab a couple of weatherproof disposable cameras because there's something about processing actual physical photos that reminds me, I'm a child of the '90s. Photos taken on my iPhone are edited with a very well-designed app called Afterglow (yeah, Instagram is too trendy now and the filters are too much), and then uploaded to Photobucket using an app called Snapbucket. Once they're on Photobucket I can resize them for the blog and voila! They will end up here.

I've discovered that it's quite easy to charge on the road if you use either a solar-powered charger (there are such things!) or an independent battery pack. A common complaint with the solar chargers seems to be that they don't have the guts to charge an iPhone battery to full, and to be honest I've left it a little late to Ebay it. I'm just going to cross my fingers and go with what I can find on trademe, unless anyone who happens to be reading this can point me to a good make/model?

OH HEY, it's just over a week until this thing kicks off! You can expect a more frequent posting schedule this week!

Preparations: keeping clean

Christmas is over, we've somehow chomped through most of January, and suddenly ... it's just around the corner, this bike trip of ours, and I'm yet to write anything substantive about our preparations. Preparing is something I savour and Lee doesn't. This has meant that I've been left to my own happy devices in terms of finding nifty gadgets, multi-use products, and tested strategies for doing everything from laundry to solar-charging your iPhone while on the road. First up: keeping clean.

Camping and tramping websites have been (not-so-refreshingly) honest about one thing: adventures of this sort are not pretty and you're probably going to pong a little bit along the way. The potential for this on a two month bike trip is ... palpable. But with these six things I think we'll be sorted - we'll be able to clean and dry our clothes, our bikes, our dishes, and ourselves (both when we're lucky enough to come across a stream when we need one and on those odoriferous occasions when we don't).




Some things to bear in mind ...

Ability to launder clothes = fewer clothes = lighter bike. One of the concerns I had with a portable washing system was the weight. However, this isn't logical - if you can't get properly clean on the road you'll want to take more clothes which will naturally mean more weight. The people at Scrubba had exactly this in mind when they filled a gap in the market and, by the looks of their reviews, filled it well. And a nice touch: shipping is included in the purchase price. While I normally wouldn't fork out for this for a one-off occasion, Lee and I are hoping to spend the year in Japan and this will give us flexibility as we'll be in hostels until we find an apartment post-arrival.

One soap to rule them all. I'd heard that there were some wonderful natural products out there that would do everything from clean my hair to clean my bike and wash away without pillaging the environment in the process (as we're freedom camping and facilities will be few and far between, this is a concern for us). Plus, multi-use products means less gear to carry. Dr Bonner is a cult brand. Their peppermint soap made the label famous, but as we're using this for everything (shampoo, body wash, laundry detergent, bike wash, dish detergent) and the peppermint scent can be quite strong to some, I went with citrus.

This shouldn't cost an arm and a leg. If push came to shove and the cost of an on-the-road laundromat was going to be ridiculous, I was more than happy to take my chances and wait until the next stream. I had a look at some elasticated clothes lines and then I realised that we could just use a bungee cord (and we'll have lots of those handy). Some improvisation will keep the price down.

Keep it simple. Three quick-drying microfibre towels and a gauze sponge that you can use to shower and to clean with should do the trick.

Next up in the preparation series: getting places and remembering we went there