By Jocelyn Land-Murphy

Kiwi hospitality, air miles and self-made sandwiches: family cycle touring on a budget

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Biking with two young kids and six months of gear garners a lot of second glances and spontaneous Q&A sessions with curious passersby. Generally it’s how far we’ve cycled from (Cape Reinga NZ, which takes folks by surprise now that we’re in Australia), how far we’re going (whatever our answer, the follow-up is, “With the kids?” (No, we’re leaving them here at this playground until July), then “Whew, it’s hilly / chilly up there!”, how far we go in a day (50 to 70 km), and “Do the kids really help pedal?” (You betcha!)
Every so often, the script takes an unexpected turn – like one Sunday morning as we’re leaving a campground on New Zealand’s north coast.
“Ah yous goin’ through Dah-ga-ville?”
“Well then, yous gotta come stay at ah place then! Come pitch yah tent in ah yahd. We’ll cook yous up some snappah!”
A rule of etiquette in New Zealand, we’ve learned, is to never say no to snappah.
And so a week later, we camped out on the beautiful back lawn of Gerrard and Lorraine, two delightful souls with a magnificent view and a fishing boat. We had hot showers, fascinating conversation about Kiwi culture and politics, and at least for Ed (our designated gratitude eater who suspends his vegetarian lifestyle for generous local offerings), some killer breaded snapper.
We’ve been treated to extraordinary hospitality on past travels – on the Camino de Santiago in Spain, villagers seeing our baby son in our backpack carrier would rush out from their quaint homes with freshly baked goodies; on our cycling honeymoon from Vancouver to Mexico, a sweet retiree named Cliff picked us up with a broken spoke, took us to dinner and paid for the repairs the next day.
But in New Zealand it seems that proactive, grand generosity is a national ethic.
We once stopped to ask a farmer directions to the locals campground, and a half-hour later we were installed in his guest rooms with a beer in hand and dinner in the oven. Another time, we arrived in teeming rain to a campsite, where the strangers in a pickup truck were waiting with a massive order of takeaway fish and chips and a bottle of fine Maori wine. “We saw you biking and it looked like rain, so we dipped into town to get you some tea [kiwi for “supper”].”
Twice we met fellow cyclists on the same north-to-south route in New Zealand, who gave us their phone numbers and made us promise to come stay when we passed through their hometowns. Those visits were among the brightest highlights of our trip.
These startling acts of kindness are fine examples for our sons, aged 8 and 6, of the very best of humanity. They introduce us to new people to share a splendid evening with. And on a slightly less enlightening note, they’re fantastic for our tight budget.
We are also part of the amazing online cycle tourist community, Warmshowers. We’ve hosted cyclists passing through New Westminster over the years in our home, providing room, meals, laundry and local route ideas; and we visit other members when we’re on the road for the same. New Zealand is packed with Warmshowers members, so we were guests about once a week with some fascinating people and families – who are now dear new friends.
It’s not just the grace of strangers that has helped us keep our Oceania Odyssey budget to a tight $100 a day (to cover everything from food and accommodation to bike repairs and adventure parks). We’re running on a combination of savings from living a low-cost lifestyle in New West (we live in a co-op and don’t own a car, opting to cycle instead) and what’s left of Jocelyn’s line of credit from med school (our trip is celebrating her graduation as a naturopathic doctor), so it’s been crucial to keep costs down, while keeping the fun maxed out.
Here are a few ways we’ve made it work:
Air miles flights. We once read about an American who bought 30,000 collector dollar coins on his credit card, got the air miles, then deposited the coins in his bank account and paid off the bill. It wasn’t so easy for us, but we stumbled on a credit card offer (thanks, Uncle John) that gave 25,000 points for signing up, and 10,000 for each friend you recruited. Free first year, cancel any time. So we read all the fine print and both went for it. Boom – 100,000 points (thanks friends who signed up – we’ve eaten a triple-scoop New Zealand ice cream in your honour). After we cancelled the card, we saw the promotion was still on, so we applied again (referring each other of course). If it wasn’t allowed, they wouldn’t let us through, right? Boom – 70,000 more points… and on (and on and on!) until we had enough air miles to fly to Auckland, then Sydney, then Tahiti, then Toronto, then home (plus enough points to fly out East for the next three summers!). “Just let us know if you would like to re-join” they would say when we called to cancel the cards, just weeks after getting them and securing our free points. “You betcha!” we would reply. Our flights for this adventure would have cost $40,000, but with fees and taxes cost us only $1,500. (Note of caution: one of our flights en route to Sydney got cancelled and Aeroplan forgot to tell us, leading to an all-nighter in Auckland waiting on hold to fix the problem. So call to check in the day before – always!)
BYOT. Camping is the way to go – pricier in parts of New Zealand than we expected (charging per person instead of per site), but still much more affordable for a family of four than backpackers. When it’s cold or rainy, campgrounds have cheap-esque cabins with bunkbeds and a heater that feel like a Hilton when you’ve been tenting for weeks on end. And most have camp kitchens with stoves and fridges, saving on cookstove fuel! Camping also allows us to “self-cater” – we cook up hot suppers and breakfasts in camp, and pack up a big lunch for the ride, avoiding the expense of eating out. In Australia we’ve seen campgrounds that provide the tent for you, already set up – but they ran over $300 per night, so bringing your own is worth the added weight on the bike rack.
Cycle! New Zealand and Australia are packed with campervans, which look like fun, cheap alternatives to hotels – but when you consider rental costs ($100 a day for a four-berth), insurance, paying for the space to park it (higher price than non-powered tent site), and gas (er, “petrol”), better to let your legs do the moving. Then again, sometimes as we exited grocery stores with overflowing carts, we wondered if maybe campervanners ate less than ravaged cyclists.
Get kids in on the budget. Our sons know that we have $100 a day, and any time we spend less, we can save for an adventure of some kind, like mini putt or kayak rentals. So Heron and Sitka are the most conscious school-aged shoppers ever, even checking the price-per-100g on the shelf tags to be sure we’re getting the best value from our avocados, trail mix or gallon tubs of ice cream.
Just say Yes. This is hard for us hyper-polite Canadians, but accepting generosity is a virtue on a social and budgetary level. People offer because they want to give. So practice saying Yes and enjoy the human connection that follows. On a recent Warmshowers visit, our host offered to give the boys a surf lesson. We imagined he had better things to do the next morning, but it turned out it was exactly what he wanted to be doing. Rod was a fantastic surf coach and cool-uncle-for-a-day, genuinely revelling in helping the boys catch their first-ever waves. And, as budget-conscious Heron pointed out later, “Best surf lesson ever, and $100 cheaper than paying for one!”
The key to accepting hospitality is to give back. In Whangarei, we repaid our hosts by volunteering ourselves and our tandems to deliver 50 pizzas for a fundraiser at their church. In Hokitika and Wellington, we made home style pizzas for our hosts. In Wanaka, we brought beer. And we always at least endeavour to do the dishes. We’ve heard of super-guests who do art or design a garden plan for their hosts – whatever their skill is, they give back.
And when in doubt, commit to yourself to pay the kindness forward. We have an awful lot of karma to pay back upon our return to New Westminster – thank goodness we now have a spare bedroom!

Ditch the razor, keep the frisbee: the great art of cycle tour packing

It all began with a locked gate.
Well, actually it started two weeks earlier, back in our townhouse in New Westminster. Jocelyn was in the final throes of studying for her naturopathic medical board exams – three straight days of testing on everything she’d learned in four years of medical school – and Ed had just wrapped his hectic four-year job as a writer. With one week to go before flying across the Pacific for a six-month cycling trip, it was time to make a packing list.
“Just bring whatever. I’m studying,” said Joce on a rare five-minute snack break. “Don’t forget the snorkel stuff.”
There’s a fine balance in cycle touring between packing everything you might need for the duration of your trip, and not weighing more than a transport truck. From our tent to our pillows, our gear is the smallest, lightest possible version of a necessity while still being big / warm / comfy enough to survive weeks in a row sleeping on the ground. We even got a tiny military-issue can opener instead of lugging the behemoth we use in our kitchen.
Ed, however, is still kind of a “just in case” kind of packer. On our longer trips, Ed compiles everything he thinks we need in a heap on the floor, then Joce reviews the pile and tosses about half of it out as non-essential. This time, we flew to Auckland, New Zealand, two days after Joce’s board exams. So the pile review never happened.
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The night before our flight, it was just Ed, his heap and the bathroom scale, allocating every last bike mirror and toothbrush to the proper duffel bag so each weighed precisely the airline limit. And hey, a frisbee doesn’t weigh much at all.
We’re also traveling with fabulous Bike Friday family tandem bicycles that are easily disassembled and folded into Samsonite hard-shell suitcases, which double as a spacious trailer system while biking. Super easy for plane travel – but on the road, more like an 18-wheel rig with pedals.
So here we were, on our second day of cycling across New Zealand, on a rugged hiking trail that was not really suited for wheeled vehicles – much less fully loaded tandems and a trailer system filled with an unreviewed heap of stuff.
Standing in front of a locked gate.
Our oldest son, Heron, spotted the wooden stairs for hikers to climb over the barbed wire fence. “Let’s unpack everything and pass it over to each other!”
“No, that’ll take too long. I’ll just lift them over,” Daddy gamely volunteered.Blog3b
Forty-five minutes later, we’d unloaded both bikes, dismantled the trailer system, passed all the bags and loose crap in the trailers – the snorkel gear, Daddy’s razor kit, the frisbee and spare bungee cords – over the fence, and re-assembled the whole caravan on the other side of the gate. We’re all still having a great time because we’ve been listening to the boys’ favourite Hedley album on the bike radio, and at least we won’t have to do that again.
Shortly thereafter, the path turned to long grass, weaving up a long, meandering hill. A few mumbled garrumps from Daddy. Our younger son, Sitka, is undeterred and sings merrily along with the Justin Bieber until we’ve all pushed the bikes to the top and less annoying terrain.
Until the next locked gate. Daddy lets a swear slip and apologizes. We try lifting the bikes again, with similar results. So we unload, dismantle and re-assemble again, to the sounds of more snappy hip-hop and pop hits. The snorkel set and frisbee are thrown over the fence. Couldn’t possibly be any more of these.
There are five more of these.
Daddy no longer apologizes for the swears, and vocally wishes harm to the members of One Direction. We whittle our dis-and-re-assemble routine down to 18 minutes – sweet. Daddy retrieves the frisbee from the bushes.
Finally, we have a downhill so steep we need to apply our extra drum brakes to keep control, and then we’re through to a sandy (but at least flat) road.
Fifteen minutes along: “Something’s rubbing,” mutters Daddy, which is cyclist talk for “I’m having a hard time and it couldn’t possibly be my fitness level.”
Daddy checks both sets of brakes and fenders. All good. Must be the sand. Are we going uphill?
“Hey Daddy is your drum brake still on from that last downhill?” asks Heron.
Smart kid.
So we pick up some speed as the sun slowly descends in the late summer sky. Just one bridge to cross and we’re almost there.
The dilapidated footbridge across a 200-metre-wide river may well have predated the invention of the wheel, much less bike trailers. We don’t discover this until we’re wedged into the narrow wooden structure. Somehow, we separate the two trailer cases and wheel them separately across. Surprisingly, the snorkel set doesn’t go into the river – but our sons’ dictionary of swears is complete.
It took another couple weeks of treacherous climbs with our massive load before we resolved to ditch half our stuff. It was Joce’s idea to mail the suitcases ahead to Invercargill – our destination at the far south of the country – and she would be in charge of the purge.
The snorkel set didn’t make the cut. Neither did the spare bungees. Daddy’s razor went in the trash. But the frisbee stayed – weight-efficient entertainment.

“Do you really need these warm socks?” Joce asked.

“I only brought them because I figured you would want them at some point and steal them for your own feet.”
We kept the socks. But the rest of Daddy’s warm clothes got sent ahead with 65 lbs of other surplus, including the suitcases we packed it all in.
We never came across another locked gate, but we encountered several narrow bridges, steep hills and tight corners where we were relieved to be traveling on just two wheels per bike. Much grumpiness was prevented, and when we met our cargo again in Invercargill, almost three months later, Ed cuddled happily in his fleece vest.
A few days later, in Sydney, Australia, the fleece got mailed ahead to Brisbane with the rest of it. Same with the snorkel gear – we’re saving that for our trip finale in French Polynesia.
And Ed’s beard has gone wild.

Two bikes, eight legs and a pannier full of granola bars: a New West family’s New Zealand cycling adventure

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It was late afternoon with just one more hill to cycle up – only this one was a 560-metre-high mountain pass.
We could have camped the night right there at Pleasant Flats. We’d already cycled 45 kilometres of gradual uphill to earn the postcard-worthy scenery looking east across the Haast River plain. Empty campervans lined both sides of the highway, abandoned by their passengers for photo-snapping of the glacier-lined valley.
But the swarming sandflies (and six-pack of granola bars we’d just devoured) emboldened us to seek out a superior sleeping spot – up and over New Zealand’s Southern Alps, via what our youngest son, six-year-old Sitka, was now calling “HAAAAAST PAAAAAASS” in a deep German accent we never knew he had.
 “I vote go for it!” pitched our oldest son and head cheerleader, eight-year-old Heron.
“HAAAAST PAAAAASS!” replied Sitka. “Hey, can we have more granola bars at the top?”
We had cycled more than 2,500 km since leaving Cape Reinga at the northern tip of North Island two months ago. But this was the steepest ascent of our trip and the sun was setting fast. So we cranked up the hip-hop mix on our bike radio and pedalled boldly onward.
Twenty minutes in, the road was still flat and the chocolate rush was fading. Then, an imposing stone archway announced the beginning of the climb. “HAAAAAST PAAAAASS!” shouted Sitka, drawing the attention of the picture-snappers who turned their lenses to us, pointing and chattering about the insane Canadians biking up a hill for which their campervans needed first gear.
The narrow road seemed to turn into a wall, winding its way around the mountainside. Both boys were standing and pushing with all the might in their little legs, rocking the bikes back and forth as Ed and Joce started setting personal mileposts every 50 metres so we wouldn’t have to consider the whole hill. Just as our legs completed the transformation to a gelatinous state, the slope smoothed out and we caught our breath.
Around the next turn, it got nuttier. For the first time in a month we were all pushing our bikes, for a couple hundred metres until the mountain relented a bit and we could ride again.
And so it continued for another hour. Each time our will began to concede, Joce would feel a reassuring little hand on her lower back. “We can do it, Mommy!”
And Ed would hear an enthusiastic “HAAAAAST PAAAAAASS!”
And then a campervan would pass, a torso hanging precipitously out the passenger window, camera in hand. We felt like Brangelina on a Greek holiday. Only sweatier.
Normally at this point of the day the boys would ask to play a math or spelling game. But even they weren’t keen for extra thinking right now. So we started singing hip-hop songs and inserting “HAAAAAAST PAAAAASS!” in the chorus, passing the time and ignoring our exhausted lower bodies until a shining signpost appeared on the horizon, like a mirage lake in the desert.
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Haast Pass.
Guess what Sitka said.
We were cycle tourists before our kids were born – Jocelyn crossed Canada from Victoria to St. John’s with the charity she founded, The Otesha Project, then coaxed Ed to bike our honeymoon from Vancouver to Tijuana down the Pacific Coast – but our best travel adventures have come with our sons in tow. When they were too young to wear helmets, we hiked across Europe and South America. We canoed down the Yukon River from Whitehorse to Dawson City,  trekked around Hawaii, and have taken yearly cycle trips with them across Quebec, BC and Washington State.
We’ve toured with the boys on Chariots, XtraCycles, Wee-Hoos and now Bike Friday family tandems on an epic, six-month “Oceania Odyssey” in New Zealand, Australia and French Polynesia (in celebration of Jocelyn’s graduation as a naturopathic doctor). So far we’ve hiked over volcanoes, through caves and next to glaciers. We’ve seen penguins in their native habitat, summoned dolphins with song and dance, and woken up to kangaroos next to our tent. And we’ve experienced extraordinary acts of hospitality and friendship from total strangers.
We’ve also gotten lost in the dark, set our campstove on fire, and stepped in several humongous, goopy cow pies. But these are stories for other days.
Several kilometres of exhilarating downhill after HAAAAAAST PAAAAAASS, we finally camped at Cameron Flat – a very basic site with no lights except our headlamps, a brilliant sky full of stars and a nearly full moon that lit up the glacier peaks of the Southern Alps unlike anywhere we’d ever been before.
We ate our pasta with gloves and toques on, as the night mist crept out of the valley below, and we slept snug in our sleeping bags as the frost congealed on our tent fly.
Best. Camping spot. Ever.
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