TimesOnline Review

November 30, 2002
Published by www.timesonline.co.uk

John Naish finds biker heaven as he discovers why New Zealand's South Island is among our top five dream destinations

The very idea of a bunch of bikers looking for adventure tends to conjure images of marauding Angels terrorising small communities. In New Zealand though, the script to The Wild One has had a radical rewrite: a gang of motorcyclists rides into rural town, pulls up at classy establishment, enjoys a gourmet dinner and the best local vintages, unpacks pyjamas and goes to bed.

Despite the old knuckle-dragging image, motorcycling has, of late, gone up in the world. The Kiwi brothers Ian and John Fitzwater spotted the fact that today's biker is more likely to be an international banker than a leather-clad sociopath, and created Adventure New Zealand Motorcycle Tours, which provides a guided blast around the South Island, this month voted in a BBC survey among the top five "must-see" places that Britons want to visit before they die.

The brothers are based in Nelson, gateway to the South Island, a place so clean and courteous that motorists slow to let you cross the street before you ever considered crossing. The guided-tour business grew out of the motorcycle shop the brothers run in the town. "We had loads of people coming in to hire bikes to go touring, but when they came back they'd missed most of the good places," says Ian. "We thought, 'hey, we can show you all the best stuff.' "

Every year the company updates its fleet of fat cruisers, big tourers, trailbikes and sports-tourers, although they didn't yet have the bike I fancied, the latest model Honda VFR800 sports-tourer. The brothers persuaded Honda to deliver one the morning we were to set off and there it sat, pristine, unridden, uncrashed: the only one in New Zealand. How much more could you tempt fate? Just two hours into the seven-day circuit of the South Island, I pulled over at the truck-stop town of Murchison for coffee and a map-check: my euphoria had reached the sort of level that governments seek to ban. The empty road sprang constant joys: sweeping curves across vast flatlands tightened into knotted mountain passes. Next up, according to my detailed pocket itinerary, came rainforest, gorges and wild coastland followed by gorse scrub with grazing stags. My dilemma: potter along and imbibe the views, or throttle up and milk the thrills.

Somewhere behind, Ian drove the support van, bringing the luggage and listening to talking books on personal psychology. If it's pouring, or you fancy a day off bikes, Ian will hitch your bike to a trailer and you can ride with him. It's worth it for the eclectic fund of anecdotes. First off, he told me he used to be an Australian prison warder. That can give you bad ideas about a person. He's been many other things besides -- sheep farmer, drag-race mechanic -- before reinventing himself as a tour operator.

"We get all sorts of people wanting to do the trip, though many are high-rollers such as film producers and international financiers," he says. "They don't just want good motorcycles and good roads, they want good everything."

Our first night on the road set the pattern, staying at Kapitea Lodge, overlooking Hokitika. The guesthouse is an eclectic mix of Zen, eco-style and sort-of-Seventies razz where Trixie, the owner and chef, produced a fine array of locally sourced eatables and drinkables.

Hokitika itself is the region's weddings-and-farm-supply centre. Its eccentric museum is a blast for anyone bored by the bland professionalism of Britain's municipals. Favourite exhibit: a massive model dredger built from 45,000 individual Meccano pieces by someone evidently in no hurry. Time runs even slower at some of the tiny towns down the road. An hour away, at Harihari, a mural celebrates the site where the first flight from Australia crash-landed in 1931. Not much has happened since.

Farther along, the gloomy bar of the Ballyhooly Arms felt initially like a Kiwi version of Deliverance ("Gonna make you baa like a sheep, boy.") I was badly mistaken: drinkers wandered out to prod the Honda and chat about bikes. The barman talked me through the highlights of a programme for a publicans' trade fair he hoped to visit.

It's not all steer and vittles, though. Each morning, Ian mapped out highlights of the road ahead, along with grave warnings of lurking perils. The native solution to ice on mountain passes is to strew corners with loose gravel. Eeek. In forests, beware NZ's possum plague: hitting one at night will have you off the bike, and the hapless marsupials seem instinctively to expire on the apex of each bend, creating daytime banana skins.

On the island's copious narrow bridges, you inevitably meet Winnebago-driving tourists charging towards you. Right of way is a mere legal nicety when confronted by several tonnes of guided homestead. Some bridges even have rail tracks running down them. If you stick a motorcycle wheel down the rut, the results can be fatal, as one unfortunate tourer discovered a few years back.

And while the national limit is a somewhat cautious 100km/h (62mph), the radar-equipped cops do not smile upon speeders. On day three, when we had reached Fox glacier, Ian told me: "If they catch you at 150km/h, they may take the bike away. At 170 they'll take you away, too." That advice might have usefully been given a little earlier. Such pitfalls should not deter, but you just have to stay sharp. I've been riding 20 years and some stretches still challenged me.

Tourist spots are amply covered by the itinerary. Stop-offs include trail walking and seal watching (an oddly compelling way to observe something grey and fat lie still). There are also regular shots of adrenalin sports such as jet-boating and the ubiquitous bungee-jumps. At Fox, the next stop from Hokitika, we tried another favourite - riding a helicopter to the peak of Mount Cook and landing on the fat snow of the range's glaciers.

Fox is symptomatic of how tourism is challenging New Zealand. Hotels and cabins are being knocked up at maniacal speed. The town's Te Weheka Inn was the only corporate-feeling hotel we visited, but even here the manageress treats you like a favourite in-law. Ian says many New Zealanders worry that tourism could wreck the place: "I had a customer come over from Hawaii who liked South Island so much he moved here. Now when I see him, he shakes his head and says, 'It's going the same way as Hawaii, spoilt before you know it.'"

It may indeed become overcrowded some day. I tried the roads in the North Island, above Auckland to the Bay of Islands and, sad to report, it's already happened there. The scenery is wonderful, but packed arterial roads make it a waste of a motorbike.

The New Zealand authorities' new tourist strategy is to manage the influx by targeting selected types of visitor who will spend much and spoil little (surely no one wants the opposite). Adventure New Zealand's customers apparently fit the right profile. Ian says they are frequently motivated by much more than a lust for two-wheeled thrills, though. "People often come because they've hit some kind of life crisis, like a marriage break-up, and they want to do something amazing to get their heads together. Come the end of the trip, they are in tears and say to me, 'Ian, this trip has changed my life,' and I think, 'Blimey mate, I only took yer round the island.'"

I'd hesitate to call any motorcycle trip life-changing, but there is something indelibly memorable about riding roads such as the Haast Pass. It was biker heaven, even through the intermittent rain that fell as I rode it. Cattle grids across the sharp-climbing corners added a new hazard, yet it rated as one of the finest bits of blacktop-adventure I've ever experienced.

Beyond that, on the high plain around Twizel, I discovered scenery-blindness: after five days of stunning snow-capped mountains reflected in crystal lake waters, you start to get blase. Up here though, the views are attention-seekingly surreal: Lake Tekapo's psychedelic-turquoise waters were fringed by spring grass the colour and clumpiness of old teddy bear fur. Once again, I thought the roads couldn't get any better. Once again they did. To any biker, I say go and do Inland Scenic Route 72 from Burke's Pass to Oxford, then take the wild coast road back to Nelson. To any non-biker I say: learn to ride, then go do it.