If only the men were this rugged

publication date: Jan 30, 2005

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author/source: Polly Evans

Sunday Times, 30 January 2005

One winter’s day a couple of years ago I came across a survey posted on the internet. According to an Auckland research company, the Real Kiwi Bloke was dying out. The traditional macho New Zealand man was hanging up his sheep shears and turning soft.

I was sitting at home in London as I read the piece and, to me, this seemed odd. After all there were plenty of perfectly macho New Zealanders striding around Earls Court. Maybe they were just experiencing some kind of weird geographical shift. But whatever was occurring, it looked as though somebody needed to go to New Zealand to investigate.

In order to reach these creatures, though, I was going to need a set of wheels. The big question was: which type? The year before I’d written a book about cycling round Spain and frankly the pedalling had been hard work. Then I struck on an idea that, from the warmth and safety of my London flat, seemed quite brilliant: I would ride a motorbike.

Fast forward some months — glossing over details of my motorbike training — and I was standing in Auckland outside a company called Adventure New Zealand Motorcycle Tours and Rentals, from which I’d arranged to hire a 650cc Suzuki Freewind, a gleaming blue-and-silver machine. It was the first day I’d ridden a bike without L-plates or without an instructor in tow.

Scared rigid by the hulking machine, I instantly forgot the very few things I did know about motorcycling — such as the fact that you should pull in the clutch when you stop. At the first red light, in a township just outside Auckland, my bike bunny-hopped and crashed to the ground.

I didn’t stand a chance of picking it up again, of course. It was far too heavy. Frustrated fellow drivers angrily beeped their horns; a kindly woman with shopping bags tried to help but even the two of us couldn’t shift the thing.

Then, as we heaved and shoved, the hitherto inert beast rose miraculously from the ground. I turned round and there behind me stood an enormous Maori man whose tattooed biceps bulged from his singlet. He appeared to have lifted the machine with a single, muscle-bound finger.

“Nice bike,” he said, and grinned.

Had I been a real anthropologist, of course, I would have stayed around and investigated this creature further. He seemed a promising specimen. But humiliated as I was, I rode off as fast as my wheels would carry me.

Fortunately, my motorbiking quickly improved — and as I travelled, other bikers told me their stories.

Just outside Tauranga I stayed with a Maori carver and motorbike enthusiast named Morris. One morning over coffee he produced from his kitchen cupboard a small vial filled with white shards.

“See this,” said Morris. “This is my elbow.” A few years back he had come off his bike on one of the gravel corners outside his house. “I was hoping, when they took the bone out, I’d be able to make a carving.”

I wondered if Morris qualified as a real Kiwi bloke. He certainly reacted with an understated nonchalance to the loss of his body parts and he seemed to spend a more than healthy amount of time in his shed. He was building a hovercraft in there, he told me. Smiling enigmatically, I climbed back on my bike and continued my quest.

Near Wanganui I spent a day and a night on a remote hillside with a gang of sheep shearers. Now these men really did seem tough. They say that shearing 300 sheep burns as much energy as running a marathon, but nobody runs a marathon every day. These men, however, were shearing 450 lambs day in, day out.

For just a couple of hours I thought I might at last have found a tiny clique of that dwindling species I was searching for. But these men were transfixed on their work. Paid by the fleece, they scarcely had time to pause between releasing one animal and grabbing the next.

Embarrassed as I am to admit it, I think the only way I could have got their attention would have been to wear a sheepskin coat. Even then, I suspect, I would have been derobed only of my outer garment and dispatched into the adjoining field with a friendly pat on the rump.

But I wasn’t giving up just yet. I still had many miles to ride.

From Wanganui I rode down the Kapiti coast to Wellington, then I crossed the Cook Strait over to the south. Along the west coast, the waves of the Tasman Sea crashed onto driftwood-strewn beaches to my right while the hills of the Southern Alps soared, snowcapped, to my left. It was summer. The rata trees bloomed scarlet and the rivers glowed turquoise, infused with glacial silt.

At Franz Josef I stopped for the night and went kayaking on Lake Mapourika with a man named Wayne, who owned a company called Ferg’s Kayaks. It was an idyllic evening. The sense of stillness was mesmerising. As the sun set, the sky turned a dusky pink; before it loomed snow-capped mountains and the infinitely slowly moving ice of the Franz Josef glacier.

“So,” I said to Wayne as we paddled back towards the shore, “why did you call your company Ferg’s?” It transpired that Ferg was his pet duckling, named after the New Zealand kayaking champion, Ian Ferguson. And it soon became apparent there was room for only one bird in his life.

I continued down the west coast, then dropped down from the tightly winding roads of Haast Pass and arrived at the sweeping bends that hugged the shores of two glimmering lakes, Wanaka and Hawea. Then from Queenstown I took the road alongside Lake Wakatipu out to Glenorchy, where the views were so sensational they were a hazard.

Still, I was starting to love riding that bike. The men may not have been making the mark but the bike was turning out to be the perfect partner. I was now on intimate terms with the throttle, and the sense of speed, the rush of wind and the movement around the bends were wildly exciting. The smells, the temperature changes, the contact with the elements — sun, rain, wind and even, on one unfortunate occasion, hail — meant so much more to me as a biker than they would have from the closeted safety of a car.

By the time I reached the far south I had built a relationship with the bike that was more rapturous by far than any of my encounters with the men. I had travelled more than 3,000 miles from the far north of the country to Invercargill on the southern tip. I had ridden mountain passes and flat coastal highways. I had been transformed from timorous novice to impassioned biker.

On my final evening there wasn’t another soul on the road. The descending sun cast long shadows across the golden grasses. Hawks skirted and dived through the hills. I turned the throttle a little more and then nudged it further still. Together, the bike and I roared into the sunset.