To read from the beginning, click here.
It was nice to start the day off with hot coffee that wasn’t heated on our little stove. The campground kitchen had a number of water boiler kettles and we used that for our press. Breakfast was granola & yogurt, one of our staples. It was a nice day so we packed up camp and headed for Godley Head.
Godley Head is a high peninsula to the southeast of Christchurch. It was the site of anti-ship gun emplacements in WW II, it’s covered with hiking trails, and also has a campground where we were hoping to spend the night.
I routed us to one of the trail heads at a place called Taylor’s Mistake. Rito’s mistake was not realizing that there was no way to get from there to the campground with the bikes. This was AFTER climbing a hors catégorie hill to get there. Dana took the steep windy paved road which was heavily laden with traffic and two other cyclists making the same climb. I didn’t feel like hiking-a-bike in that narrow corridor and from past experience knew I would be walking. I instead took a path that led off a dead-end street to a network of trails to the top. That proved to be its own hors catégorie climb as I struggled to push the bike and bags up what was probably and 18-20% grade dirt track. Thankfully that only lasted for about 100 ft and then I got on more normal trails to the top where Dana was waiting.
We started the long descent to Taylor’s Mistake thinking the whole time, “Hope we don’t have to come back this way.” Once we got to the bottom, I quickly realized my error and told Dana that the only way to the campground was to walk sans bikes, or to climb out and back up another long hill to the campground road.
Taylor’s Mistake, by the way, was guiding his ship into Boulder Bay instead of the next bay south and grounding it. There were signs all around naming the bay and day-use area, but not a one explaining what his alleged mistake was. Anyway, back to us! There was a row of cabins along the path out to and up to the end of the peninsula and I saw a woman sitting inside one of the cabins which was obviously not a vacation rental as some of the others were. I knocked and asked her if we could stash our bikes beside her house while we went on a hike and she assented. One sigh of relief as we could at least get a hike in. We did 10km (6 miles), traversing the peninsula and all the gunnery and barrack structures. A good hike with great scenery and some education.
We still had a problem though. Where to camp that night? We went back down to Taylor’s, retrieved our bikes, and made dinner on one of the many picnic tables. It was getting late though, and Dana went back to the house where we left the bikes and asked if we could camp behind their cabin. Gordon & Donna said, sure, come and go as you like. We were ecstatic that we had a place to camp that would not be in the “no camping” zone. Dana learned that Gordon & Donna had lived there for six months, didn’t own a car, but climbed that hill to go get groceries. The cabin didn’t have a bathroom, so they used the public toilets we used. We set up the tent and climbed in for a windy, but otherwise silent night.
Leave a Reply