I live on a small island out in the middle of nowhere

Sometimes I get a good reminder that I live on a small island out in the middle of nowhere. I've found a good dog food that I really like called Nutra Gold. It costs about $120 for a 15kg bag, but that's pretty normal for a premium food here. The dogs are on the Salmon and Potato at the moment and are doing well on it. However, I've run out and I usually order it online, but that supplier is out of stock. So I've been looking around and it turns out that there is none to be found in the whole country and no one knows when some might be arriving. I guess I need to start stock piling.

Otago Rail Trail

In July I had my first visitor in NZ. Hang came for two weeks and we headed down to the South Island to ride the Otago Rail Trail.
This former rail line is now a beautiful 150km bike trail located in Central Otago near the south end of the South Island. We started in Clyde "A" (not too far from Queenstown) and rode to Middlemarch "B" (not too far from Dunedin).

Riding 150km along a rail line doesn't sound very difficult. But the trail is NOT FLAT (see the elevation map below) and half thawed gravel is pretty slow going and we averaged about 10km/hour.

Ranfurly bike hire were wonderful at making all of our accommodation bookings and arranging our luggage transfer.

It turns out that the middle of winter is not really peak time on the rail trail. We saw 5 people in 4 days, but I think we were the only ones doing the full trail. But the weather was nice. A little frosty in the mornings, but nice and sunny during the day. The area is quite dry and doesn't get a lot of rain. However the winds can be quite strong during the summer and many people need to be rescued from the winds. So we figured we actually picked the best time to do it.

Quirky NZ

I'm going to add a new segment to my blog. Sometimes you come across something in NZ that just seems odd, strange or funny as (I'll have to start a Kiwispeak section to explain that expression).





















This is not a joke. This is for real.