Hanmer Springs, Day 1

Today we headed off for the second leg of our South Island tour. We're starting off with two nights in Hanmer Springs, then Blenheim, Nelson, and a few other places around the west coast, so the trip should be nine or ten nights in all depending on whether places are good enough to justify two nights' camping or just one.

Hanmer Springs is an Alpine village about two hours' drive from Christchurch. The village itself is tiny - there are only 700 permanent residents - but it is surrounded by forested mountains which look lovely in the distance, and it is also home to some natural thermal springs. We haven't tried those yet but I hope to tomorrow. After setting up our tent in the Top 10 campsite, we headed out to get some food, and then rented bikes from the Hanmer Springs Adventure Centre for a couple of hours. As it turned out, our arrival at 3.25pm meant that we wouldn't get the full two hours that we were paying $25 each for, since the shop closed at 5pm, but we decided to suck it up and just go as far as we could in that time. I was really happy to be back on a bike again, and the breeze in our faces was very cooling in the 30c heat, but things went awry quite quickly as Skry's chain kept coming off and his gears wouldn't change. We had to turn back and go to the shop for a replacement, knocking another half hour off our available time. What was worse, despite acknowledging that they had given Skry a faulty bike and this had ruined the first part of our ride, the manager wouldn't give us a refund on the second hour - "We don't do refunds". So we ended up paying for two hours and getting one - I was NOT impressed.

Once our route map trail led us into the forest, it was no time at all before we had taken a wrong turning somewhere and ended up on an extremely narrow dirt track which was clearly designed for serious mountain bikers. It was uphill, it was too narrow for me to cycle (I was scared of wobbling off into the gully on the immediate right), and the heat and exercise on top of a big plate of venison sausages and mash was making me feel like I could throw up at any second. This part of the ride wasn't much fun! But eventually we found our bearings again, and also found a proper gravel road with a gentle downhill incline, so we freewheeled most of the way back.

After returning the bikes and retiring to the tent to lie down for an hour, the temperature had dropped enough for us to venture out and tackle some mini golf. This was load of fun and we treated ourselves to a well-earned pint before heading back to the campsite for the night.