Horizons Unlimited - The HUBB - Riding Down Under in NZ & OZ

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Riding Down Under in NZ & OZ

Hello, we are Richard and Claire from Gatineau, Québec, Canada. We are experienced riders in North America who travelled from East to West across Canada and the US, and from Alaska to California to Louisiana.

We left home on January 25, 2017 for a six-month motorcycle trip in New Zealand and Australia. Our travel plan is quite open with only one flight booked to Christchurch, NZ and return from Melbourne, OZ mid-July. We have limited camping gear and we usually never know in the morning where our journey will take us. It depends on the weather and recommendations from local people. We have a good Nikon camera with us as well as a GoPro camera but this equipment is brand new for us and we’re currently learning how to manage the images captured along the way.

We have purchased two motorcycles just before our arrival in Christchurch, thanks to Nigel, super moderator on the HUBB. Claire has a BMW F650GS and Richard has a Suzuki DL650 V-Strom that we intend to sell in 4 to 6 weeks. We plan to visit both islands and return to Christchurch before flying to Australia.

Our first impressions are that the vegetation and weather here are quite different and varies depending on which side of the Alps you are. At a few occasions, we encountered very strong winds with gust up to 100 km/h making the ride quite difficult. However, we found a lot of fantastic twisty roads to ride in the mountains with very good pavement condition. Also, there is no need to talk about the beauty of the landscape… as you will notice in the pictures below.

Some of the challenges so far are the difficulty to charge our electronic equipment like laptop, cell phones, camera, GoPro and GPS. Communications are limited due to lack of free Wi-Fi and cell phone coverage in certain areas. We noticed that cost of life is higher here, especially for gas, which may be more than twice what we pay in Canada.

Our intention is to present some videos on this thread along with some pictures. However, a challenge we face is the lack of space on our hard drive to store all those images. During an attempt to free up some space, we accidentally deleted some files related to the 3 first episodes of our trip; therefore they are unavailable for now. If we find the time, we will try to recreate those first episodes and post them later on. Meanwhile, we have selected a few of the best pictures covering the very first couple of days of our trip.

Christchurch – January 27-28, 2017
Re: START Mall
https://farm5.staticflickr.com/4280/...310c3d6dd2.jpg DSC_0015 by Claire Girard, sur Flickr

No images showing unfortunately. Glad you are doing a report and I look forward to it

For info on how to post photos, see
Horizons Unlimited - The HUBB - FAQ

and be sure to scroll all the way down, there is a short one at the top and much more detailed farther down.

Also have a look at our NEW blogging system available to all for free, and no photo restrictions:
Travel Stories | Horizons Unlimited

Quote:

Originally Posted by ClaG (Post 556694)

By the way, when you get home we'd love to have you present your story at the HU Ontario Travellers Meeting!

Follow-up on Riding Down Under in NZ & OZ

Hello Grant and RobD,
Unfortunately, the internet was so weak yesterday that we didn't succeed in posting our pictures or the video. We will try again whenever possible. Today is a sunny day and we must take this opportunity to ride to Milford Sound.

Thank you Grant for the information, we will look at this asap. We have made good progress yesterday in learning all these new tools and we expect to become experts within the next few months... :D
It would be really nice to meet you at the next HU Meeting in Ontario next Fall!
Claire & Richard

IMHO, NZ may well have the best motorcycling roads on Earth. I've toured on a motorcycle a couple of times, and thoroughly enjoyed the riding on both trips.

Hi ClaG
Sounds like a very interesting trip.
1. advice I can chip in with because you have limited space on your PC then look to buy a SEAGATE slim 2TB external hard drive.
Very small just bigger than a pack of smokes.
with your GoPro set at full HD and using a 64 Gb sim card, you should be able to video 4.5 hours.

So the 2 TB drive should hold about 140 hours of videos.
Or 10.000s pictures

Good luck with your ride.

http://i1360.photobucket.com/albums/...pscaj5vshw.jpg

Quote:

deleted some files

Are not lost on your PC you just need to know how to recover them ????
But you need to stop using the PC at that time so you don't overwrite the lost files, but maybe too late in your case,
But it would be a good idea to read up on this process just in case it happens again?

You should be able to pick up an external hard drive in a store called 'the warehouse', they have an out of town one in pretty much every NZ town and its coloured red, hard to miss!

Sent from my SM-A310F using Tapatalk

Thank you for the advice. As soon as we get to Dunedin, we will get one.

Pictures posted for Riding Down Under in NZ & OZ

Pictures from Feb 2 - Arthur's Pass NP

Pictures from Feb 3 - Near Franz Josef Glacier

Pictures from Feb 4 - Haast to Queenstown and Moke Lake

Pictures from Feb 6 - Te Anau to Milford Sound (Fiordland NP)

Pictures from Feb 8 - Hollyford Road (Fiordland NP)