A wanderer in Kiwiland

In 2018 I met Roger Grierson during a bike ride in Holland. Sometime later he invited me over in New Zealand, which is also known as kiwiland. I went for it and found myself on the other side of the planet. Here many things happened, so many that I said I could write a book about it, so I did. Travelling over 8000 kilometers by car and 800 by bike, meeting a lot of different people on the way. I hope you enjoy reading this book reliving my travels and that it may contradict to pick New Zealand for a holiday location.

Arie van’t Geloof was born in Dirksland in 1987 where he still lives, he is an amateur cyclist for about 20 years now. For work he is a civil engineer in Rotterdam. Furthermore, he likes to go ice skating in winters, he has done the 200 km Weissensee tour twice. He is also a dog enthusiast, he likes to train his parents dog Kyra for sheep herding in the nearby town of Melissant. For music he prefers to listen to alternative rock, bands like Foo fighters, Oasis and Tame Impala are in his playlist. Beside that he likes to travel to countries that are different from the flat Dutch landscape, which is basically any country in the world.

I picket together the stuff I thought I needed to make it to the top and back, Roger had given me the advice to bring warm clothes, drinks and food, because the weather could change very quickly in this area. I put those in my bag, since I did not have hiking shoes I was just in my regular clothes with my regular blue sport shoes prepared to run up the mountain. At first I passed a small building were some guides where waiting for groups to show up.

One guide asked me: ‘What is your plan?’

I replied: ‘My plan is not to have a plan.’

He and the other guides started laughing.

He said: ‘Then you can do the four hour track.’

Which was a loop around the place, not to the red crater of Mount Doom. I started walking and felt the hip, my left leg that was not good, the same for my rib, it might have been injured as well in the crash. However, I kept on going where they told me to go, in fact for the moment there was just a one lane route going in the direction of the mountains, the weather was a bit clouded but I had a view over the area. I passed a lot of  people, however one fast guy passed me and I had trouble to follow him, he was all the time having contact with someone else through a radio, after fifteen minutes or so I saw him standing next to a group, he was a guide.