After adrenaline-soaked Queenstown, we headed 45 minutes east to Central Otago, the stone fruit capital of the south island. We stayed in Alexandra in a small apartment. The region was completely different from the mountainous, lake area of Queenstown. It was very dry, with rolling, rocky hills and a bit like the Palisades/Grand Junction area. It apparently gets about the same amount of rain each year as Boulder, so almost desert-like. The little towns of Central Otago decided to get into the tourist act, so a number of years ago they created the Central Otago Rail Trail, a gravel bike trail of about 150 km going from town to town on an old rail bed. So we decided to rent bikes and spend a day on the trail. In Omakau, we rented “sports mountain bikes” from a bike shop that specialized in putting together multi-day bike trips for the lots of foreigners that come to ride the trail. These bikes must have weighed about 100 lbs. each – I can’t imagine what their “comfort bikes” weighed! But they worked fine, once we got used to being on flat pedals without being clipped in. We road about 40 miles total on the bike trail and had a very nice day but I never want to ride that far again without my bike shorts. Ouch! First we did a quick detour in Ophir, strangely pronounced
Oaf–a. This town of about 50 people has the oldest operating post office in New Zealand. The postmistress was very proud of the post office and invited us in to the back and showed us all of the old postal stuff that they had collected over at least 120 years. They still hand cancel with an old stamper and she invited us to cancel a postcard, if we wanted. And then we poked our heads into the old jail building in the back. We then headed out to the trail. Midday, we stopped at a café in the middle of nowhere for coffee and spoke with the owner. She was a bit frazzled as the electric company had decided to turn off her power for 5 hours without telling her and she had a constant stream of cyclists in looking for food and cold drinks. She said she had built the café there 5 years ago just to support the trail riders, as about 20,000 people a year bike the trail. Most of them seemed to be in the 50 – 65 year old age group and did not appear to have ridden a bike since they were children. I believe the bike shops deliver their luggage each day to the little town hotels where they spend the night. It was very hot and no shade and fun for a day, but I’m not sure I would want to have been out there baking for 4 days straight.
The Ophir post office.
And the jail house out back behind the post office.
An old historic bridge on our way out of Ophir and back to start the rail trail.
Our stating point on the rail trail.
You have GOT to be kidding…..
My girl.
A very cool and dark tunnel.
This is pretty much what the landscape looked like the entire ride.
The next day we toured a few local towns and visited the big hydro dam beach. Back in the 90’s they had flooded Cromwell, the next town up for a huge hydro lake, and as a result, the new Cromwell looks like some planned community out of a horror movie – too new to be real. We went to some of the farm stands, as it was prime peach, apricot and cherry season, with the new apples in as well. But I was grossly disappointed, as everything they sold was hard as a rock and sometimes green. After hearing people rave about the fruit from Central Otago, I was expecting the equivalent of our wonderful Palisades peaches, but it was not to be. The peaches are lousy! So the next day we packed our bags yet again and headed off to Wanaka.