The Otago is New Zealand’s original rail trail in their Great Rides initiative. It’s 160km and we wanted to do it all so we’ve made arrangements with one of the many trail service companies to transport our luggage and line up accommodations.
Day 1: Clyde to Lauder (47km)
That should have been 44km but we burned an extra 3 trying to find the trail! The town of Clyde is really nice with restored buildings from the gold mining days and several restaurants. The Antique Lodge where we are staying is a series of quite large cabins behind a huge sycamore tree on the main street in town.
It was cloudy and somewhat windy when we set off on the trail, but you can see signs of spring all around. This is just the start of the trail-riding season. There are many riders in the Summer, although the summers are really hot and the fields get dry and brown (they get very little rain in Central Otago). Their big season is the Fall (around the Easter Break) when people come to see the autumn colors.
The trail is pretty heavy with gravel which makes for slow going but the scenery is so good that you can just chill and enjoy the ride. The flowers are really lovely and there are sheep galore, many with tiny baby lambs
We have a rail trail passport which can be stamped at all of the towns and old railroad stations along the way. It’s a fundraiser for trail maintenance and who doesn’t love collecting stamps. We really enjoyed the Galloway stop.
Yup, that was it for Galloway. They have restored some of the gangers’ sheds and now use them as mini information and shelter sites along the trail
We had a very nice lunch at the tavern in Chatto Creek which is right next to New Zealand’s smallest operating Post Office. The owner of the tavern is the Postmistress.
Tom bought a packet of jellybeans there which led to a tale about the original postmistress (who gave out jellybeans) and then a tour of some of the old photos from the tavern and postoffice. The tavern is also decorated with some ancient rifles and stuffed things that had presumably been shot by the ancient rifles. The ratio of interesting stories from people living along the Central Otago trail is very high. 🙂
Our B&B in Lauder is right on the trail and even has a hot tub! We were moved to a fancier cottage with a more private setting so that the film crew from Mulan would not disturb us – very cool that Mulan is being filmed in NZ and very considerate of the couple that owns the B&B. The film crew must be scattered all over the place for accommodation as nothing is very big here. We did hear that the big stars are helicoptered to Queenstown every night and that they have brought in 150 Mongolian horsemen!
After a great hot tub soak we had dinner across the road at the Lauder hotel, also owned by a very nice couple. He tends bar and waits on tables and she does the cooking. Wednesday night is when the “surfing club” meets in the bar so he warned us that they could be rather boisterous. Turns out the surfing club is the local farmers and Lauder, BTW, is about as far as you could possibly get from the ocean! They were boisterous, dinner was delicious and we ended with best sticky date pudding that we’ve had so far.
Day 2, Lauder to Waipatia: 57KM
Our hosts volunteered to do a photo shoot for us in the morning and really wanted an arms raised woo hoo picture.
Day 2 started with a gorge, a viaduct and two old railroad tunnels. The beauty and serenity is hard to describe and even hard to capture in pictures.
We go over many bridges of various types, frequently pretty high up, often narrow, and almost always over some gorgeous river or valley. The challenge is making across unscathed while catching the view!
The first half of trail rises on a gradual incline. The gravel makes that incline a bit more noticeable than it would be on pavement so we were very happy to see this
And it was indeed pretty much all downhill or flat from there.
Lunch was at the cafe at Hayes Engineering. Mr. Hayes was an inventor who made many useful farm implements and Mrs. Hayes was the itinerant salesman who went from town to town and farm to farm selling the products. We ate with a retired farming couple who had sold their farm outside Napier a number of years ago and took up cycling to keep active in the “leisure community” that they moved to.
Along the trail they also have a scale-model of the solar system. It is a 100,000,000:1 ratio, so 1 cm. = 1 km. The “sun” is in Ranfurly and its circumference is shown by yellow tape (they are hoping to build a sphere to walk/ride through), and the planets are spaced along the trail using the average distance of their orbits around the Sun and also shown to scale. They have the planets in both directions from the Sun so that you can see the relative distances regardless of the direction you are heading. It does put the distances and sizes in perspective because all of the planets from Mars to Mercury are quite close to Ranfurly (the Sun) while Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are quite far apart and quite a distance from Ranfurly.
Our lodging for the night was the Waipatia Country Hotel which appeared to be the only thing for miles around.
Bar and small dining room in the front and guest rooms in the back. We had a decent pub type meal and were sound asleep shamefully early.
Day 3 Waipatia to Middlemarch: 53K
I’m pretty sure we had that hotel all to ourselves last night. They locked the door to the bar, left breakfast fixings and a packed lunch for us in the guest lounge and told us to leave by the back door if we were leaving before 10. We were on the road by 9 as our shuttle back to Clyde was departing at 2:30. Turned out that the time constraint was little challenge since the surface was much more hard-packed for this section and the downhill sure helps a lot! We saw a total of 4 other riders and enjoyed yet another day of incredible beauty and peace
