Woe is me
I am haunted by the god of mechanical difficulties. The weather god
smiles on me and only sends rain at convenient times, like when I’m
WWOOFing or at night. His little brother gleefully torments me with
major bicycle issues in the middle of nowhere on the Saturday before
Christmas.
In short, I fell off my bicycle and broke the internal hub
derailleur. The pin that is pulled in and out is bent, and the
mechanism that is pulled by the deralleur cable is in an odd
state. The cable is in bad shape itself, but that was already the case
from its daily jostling by the handlebar bag.
I can still bike. I can even still bike up decent sized hills. The
derailleur is stuck in either the granny gear or the middle gear, I
can’t quite tell. (I haven’t had to go up a killer hill yet, thank
god.) My current plan is to bike two short days and end up in Gisborne
on Boxing Day, to see if a bicycle store is by chance open, and
possibly can fix my bike. I suspect I will have to wait until Napier
or Wellington. (My criteria for a worthy bike shop mechanic
have shot up drastically since I entrusted the SRAM derailleur to LL
Bean and wasted $20.) I think it’s a three day bike ride to Napier,
and I’ll take the train to Wellington from Napier, so it’s feasible to
wait for a better mechanic, especially since I’d rather spend multiple
days in Napier or Wellington, and am actually already planning to.
In other news, I biked another 90km day. My ass hurts. I don’t know
what is wrong with these bike shorts. Maybe it’s my ass. Luckily my
right knee doesn’t hurt, despite hurting so much yesterday to make me
consider spending a day in the same campsite. Oh, but I have two
sandfly bites on my ass. If they progress as normal, they should be
gone in about ten days. They will itch for about seven days. Kill me
now.
In the boring bits of today, I stopped for a latte and some ginger
cake at a Manuka Honey factory store and cafe. The factory cat was
incredibly lovable.
I ended up at a backpackers in Tokomaru Bay, rather than pitching a
tent behind a sketchy looking hotel with bar and hot pools in Te
Puia. Only because I knew it was 11 km all downhill to Tokomaru
Bay. (Almost all downhill.) It’s a very homey backpackers, somewhat
like the Treehouse. I came in rather antisocial, though, since I hurt
and was very hungry and tired. Nick the biker from Auckland is here,
too. I recognized his bike before I recognized him. Huh.
I spent a lot of time dreading the hill up to Te Puia, since it looked
lethal in the Pedaller’s Paradise. It wasn’t lethal at all, and
I figured out that the author had squeezed in more mileage
(kilometerage?) than usual on his topo line, making the hills look
even steeper.
Wow. A French woman here just started talking about how bad women were
with maps, and I just couldn’t let that go, so I piped up saying, “I
got myself halfway across the US, so I don’t you can blame bad
map-reading on gender.” Way to be socially inept, Jess. I wasn’t even
in the conversation.