Kahurangi 500 -Bike packing – Gearing up for Gearing down

As you can probably guess… we love bikes, and we love bikes for a multitude of reasons, first and foremost are the many freedoms that a bike can give you. They’re small and very strong so you get a lot more freedom in terms of where you can take them both on road and off!! They also have the ability to carry enough gear to make you incredibly self sufficient… which is precisely why we like travelling multi day by bike… call it what you want… bikepacking, fastpacking,gravel biking, bike touring it all equates to the same feeling when you throw your leg over the bike and head off into the sunset.

We’ve had our sights set on the Kahurangi 500 bike packing route for a while now, as we believe it’s the premier semi wilderness bikepacking route in New Zealand. There’s a pretty loosely defined 500 km circuit from Tapawera to Tapawera, but being local to the area we’ve managed to bump this number up to roughly 650Km by taking in a few more backroads.

The Kahurangi 500 can be knocked off pretty quickly, but we’ve decided to take a more relaxed approach to it and thoroughly drink in the scenery and catch up with a few other adventurers along the way. The full route will take us 10 days including 2 nights each on the Ghost road and Heaphy tracks.

We’re also quite craftily making this one of our Scottish Express monthly specials which get folk on both the Ghost road and Heaphy for $150 , this will allow us to swap out from our Gravel Bikes to our Mountain bikes for both the Ghost road and the Heaphy tracks… ideal… the right bike for the right track!!

Apart from the challenge of the trip and the scenery, one of the other driving factors why we’re participating in this trip is that we’re starting to build up a small fleet of adventure bikes and Bike packing equipment for hire at Scottish Express. Testing the hire bike gear means we know it’s up to specification before we start hiring it out to customers; this is really important.  We’d also like to thoroughly sort out logistics for some suppotrted trips for the Kahurangi 500 to increase the accessibility for people to do this amazing loop.

So far we have two reasonably light 29ers we are currently upgrading and have a range of bike backing and touring bags and carriers to test on them, as well as having options to customise set ups for individuals

The set up pictured below weighs in at 17.5kg with clothing and sleeping gear suited for early spring, adding a days worth of food and cooking and camping gear pushes that 21.5kg

We opted for a 1 by 10 ( 30 tooth +11/36). We’ve trained with this, and with the lighter weight of the rig for most of the journey, we should be able to make it up most of the hills without pushing. No doubt we may be reviewing this post trip!!

Packing for Bike packing is always a tricky one, as it’s a fine balance of minimising weight and keeping your bike reasonably aerodynamic but still having the right amount of gear. Fortunately on this tour we only have to camp once along the way. so we have chosen to go with the Aeroe rack system, as it allows us to send the camping gear ready packed in an addtitional Aeroe rack cradle to Collingwood, so we can just attach it to the rack when we get there.

To up the ammount of time we spend on the saddle on the back roads we’ve tweaked the route a bit.

Firstly we’ve gained permission from 140 forestry to take in back roads in the forestry blocks between Wakefield and Kohatu which, weather permitting, should offer us some great views of Kahurangi National Park.

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The second back road detours from the normal route which runs on the Tadmor Glenhope dry road. By turning off at Tadmor you can get to the Sherry river road, which is quite a nice deviation on a winding backcountry road, this road morphs into Mcintyre road and sets you to come back out onto the Glenhope Tadmor dry road slightly south of the township of Kaka

The final backroad is The Barron’s flat Mountain bike route which runs from upper takaka to Flora carpark this starts with a reasonably grunty climb out of the Takaka valley but plateaus out quickly for the middle section before the final haul up the track beside flora stream.

Flora Carpark Via Barron Flat To Upper Takaka

Should be a great trip around the top of the South. We’ll post up a trip report after we are back to give you a bit more insight into the trip and route as well as other great bike packing routes in the area.