Day 10 - Pipiriki to Whanganui - 81 km, 973 m

 






Technically if one starts a journey 70 km's upstream beside a river and finishes that journey at the coast (sea level) then on average the journey is downhill. Now while the route we followed today did pretty much that, follow the river out to the sea somehow the roading people managed to find a way to include 973 metres of elevation to have to climb! On a hot day and on the last significant hill there was a huge sigh of relief to have hit the saddle before a fantastic twisty, turny downhill.

The old school at Matahiwi is now a cafe that does good muffins, so good infact that we all went back for seconds and treated that 11:00 AM stop as our morning tea come lunch stop.

The road out to S H Way 4 was relatively quiet and we stopped in the shade of a farmers front garden for a breather and Peter went in to have our water bottles filled up. That took quite some time as the farmer couple were very pleased to be able to tell Peter the entire history of the locality. Although we were invited back in for a cup of tea Stephen and I thought we should pass as it sounded like it could have become quite a session!

We got to the last significant hill and Peter took off in the heat never to be seen again until we all got to the top where there were some really nice views back up the Whanganui River - it's so large that a photo does not do it justice.

The last 10 km of the trail in to Whanganui follows the North bank of the river and is very pleasant. We found our YHA hostel for the night and then I took off in to the town to find the bike shop as I needed to replace the pedals I had put on the bike before I left (they were simply a set that I had in the shed and clearly not up to constant use and I didn't want to malfunction down the track - so out they went).

Now something totally unrelated to cycling however not unrelated to travelling in that one learns new stuff and while not exactly new to me the number of people I found embracing the "New English" quite high. Let's be clear that English and its peculiarities is not my forte (like I think my School Cert mark was the 30% or "just passed") - things like apostrophe, colon and semi colon use I find best to apply the "Chris Jones rule of rotation" - i.e. if you have just used one then use the other or in the case of the apostophe place it after the "s" if the last time it was used was before the "s".

Something is "somethink" that some people like to think is a word (I'm pretty sure it's not) and some of yous people may like to correct me on that. Now that brings me to the next development of the spoken English language we have hear lots of on this trip and it's probably coz there's three of us. By now yous know what I am referring to and of course it is the "yous' word - or what is now the commonly plural for "you". On many occasions I have been told we have "yous over there in cabin four" or "if yous guys can sign in here" or "which one of yous fellas ordered the tea".

Interesting!!!

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