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the sanity of it all . What little time I had to enjoy the views was lost as the bike decided it wanted me off .
This evil grey stone was now in my head and would remain so for the days to come , I was convinced that somewhere in the vast wilderness of this land I would die and never be found , buried beneath the crushed shale of a nearby mountain that had been scattered across a road .
As the days went on the gravel ground its way deeper into my subconscious . At night I could hear that telltale crush of stone against stone compacted by the rubber of a tyre struggling for grip . What the hell was going on ? I was being ground down by the very stuff that makes up this island , I was losing the plot , insanity was knocking on the door .
New Zealand ’ s real tracks are those that challenge , the Big River track , the Omarama Saddle , and nothing more so than the Manuherikia River Track with its thirty or so river crossings and the rock hopping in between , but it ’ s the connecting roads that are evil , the grey devil wanting to drag a bike and rider to their ultimate demise .
What was it about this stuff that saw it everywhere , at times scattered across sealed roads and at others deep and rutted on perfectly good tracks ?
The further south we went the more obvious it became as to why this horrible stone surface was everywhere . Winter was coming . It seemed incredulous to someone who lives just across the Tasman Sea , a mere stones throw in the greater scheme of things , yet here on the southern island of our neighbours to the east , winter was indeed coming . I grappled with the idea that at home the daily temperatures were in the mid-thirty-degree Celsius range , and however here in New Zealand it was struggling to reach half of that . Admittedly , we were more south
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