The Slow Road
by Ken Rubeli

How far did you travel? What was your longest day? No one asks about the dawn view from the unzipped opening of a tiny tent. No one probes my feelings about taking so long covering such little ground.

Our society is one that values quantity. Speed is the essence. A maximum of targets in the minimum of time. The attractions are a hit and run, a photograph sufficient evidence to claim the site as yet another notch carved on the credit card, the conquest simply to have been there.

I pedalled 700 kilometres through New Zealand, just one scenic corner of the Northern Island. That's worth telling for the wealth of opportunity in that span of antipodean landscape. Small towns, farmhouses, outbuildings, country churches, shelters for roadside goats, and other architectural joys and uglinesses. Quilts of agriculture, blanketfolds of forest. Coastline of the broad expanse of tidal mudflat and mangrove, of rocky promontory and elegant pohutukawa trees, of sheltered bay with sandy beach or round-pebble harbour, of industrial wharf and fishing-boat busyness, of shacks and dinghies and old rope and the stuff the sea brings in to rest.

At Orokei Korako, a place of bubbling mud and geysers, the ground beneath my sleeping mat was warm. Terra infirma. My ear pressed down into my pillow heard the gurgle of the earth's blood, felt the gurgitations of the boiling soup beneath this thinnest realm of planetary crust. At Okautu where I slept was on a sharp-ridged isthmus, to the sunrise-side a bay of gentle sweep; to the other, ocean, boundless, on which floated thirteen islands silhouetted on the sunset. At Kaueranga I divined, in midst of adolescent forest striving weakly to achieve its former glory, the ghosts of mighty kauri trees felled a century before. There I pitched my humble tent and laid my bicycle down.

I soaked myself in people too. People talk so readily to cyclists. We've no pretence to make a wall to conversation. No door or window as a barrier. A solitary cyclist has a look that says I'm here to share, come share your stories with me. We look a little vulnerable too, we solo travellers, and kindly locals feel it's their responsibility to say hello and welcome, and do you know a cyclist died here twenty years ago, butchered by a lunatic!

I met no lunatics, though I nodded to some fellow touring cyclists tortoising among the highway hares. Mostly I talked with other campers, others travelling the land with time at end of day to pause and let reflections flow. A man told me the strain that came upon his marriage when he reached retirement; how a night away in his small caravan gave his wife and him a habitat of hope. I spent an hour beside a lake with a fellow who turned scraps of wood into whatever he could sell at market days across the country: rolling pins and walking sticks, spoons and cupboard handles, spinning tops and letter openers. And I listened to his thoughts on being on your own. Not alone, he said; a soloist.

A fisherman who made no criticism of my camp a stone's throw from his favourite casting spot discussed at length the plants and animals -- fish among them -- that came to this land with the colonisers and have taken over. Fifty million Australian possums in New Zealand; European rabbits, stoats, weasels; sparrows, carp... Gorse and Monterey Pine gone mad. And we planned to turn the world around to seeing feral fur as a resource to proudly wear down catwalks or to the local shops in warm defence against the winter.

With the inner eye of lunacy I always try to time my cycle touring either side of a full moon. As each day's journey spills into the night, a moon grants extra hours to absorb a fresh environment in uncoloured, softer light. A moon on lake or sea or forest? How many hotels offer this from five-star windows, curtains drawn while clientele enjoys liqueurs and floor show?

My restaurant this evening is in forest with a small stream, and an owl. I have a tiny spirit-burning stove, and a single saucepan with a lid and folding handle. The menu is without choice on this my final night: Rices of the World (the sort of packet dinner I would never eat at home) augmented with fresh garlic, ginger, chilly, two-days-on-the-road salami, and a sprinkling of salted peanuts. Cordon bleu sous le clair de lune!

I am here to steer away from crowds, traffic, commerce. For me the edge of land and sea, the open mouths of rivers, the winding roads through rolling hinterland of grass and weed, sheep and cattle, forest, stream, waterfall, lake, and river back to sea again.

Ride it. Meet it face to face, its sounds and sights and smells. Feel it. Self-reliant and human-powered, explore life's simple joys. And on return, in silent satisfaction softly glow.