« Along For The Ride
6 - Pimp My Ride!
Description
From the eastern side of Mt Ruapehu, Simon Morton slips past a famous car wreckers yard to reach the Army Museum in Waiouru. Historian Windsor Jones lets him ride one of his 100 year old bikes, but this one went to war! Simon uncovers the explosive backstory of the NZ Cyclists Corps from WWI, and wonders what modern commuters would think of a bike equipped with a .303…
Up the road, in the ‘trout-fishing capital of the world’ (here we just call it ‘Turangi’) Simon saddles up to go fly-fishing with a motel owner Ross Baker who has specially adapted his cycles to carry both fishermen and their…(ahem) rods… Then local legend Walter De Bont is the star of the show in Taupo. The ex-pat Dutchman founded one of the biggest bike races in the whole hemisphere before setting out to clean up Taupo, one paper cup at a time.
On the way to his next stop, Simon meets blind cyclist Vern Pavreal, his wife and their dog, while learning that baked beans are not the same as ‘wind power’. In the full-throttle town of Rotorua, Simon dodges mud-pools and marae to race two bikes sent back from the future. The first has been funded by Google, as a major innovation in public transport. The Schweeb is a pedal-powered-pod on a lightweight monorail – and man, does it move! The second is a super-fibre wonder-creation that is built in a woolshed by the carbon-crazy Graeme Pearson. Simon tries a bike with no frame, and learns that doing it the old way, isn’t as cool as you might think. ‘All goods’, as they say…
