I've not been on a proper bike tour for 20 years, but have a month/5-week sabbatical Feb/March 2025 and have been wanting to do New Zealand for a while. Below is my best guess for a 30-day tour based on what I've read here and on the NZ cycling web sites. This is a 1500km tour with about 14km of elevation gain.
The idea would be to fly into Christchurch and transfer to Mount Cook Village by bus, ride the A2O trail down most of the way, then cut over to the Otsago Rail Trail. Take that up to Queenstown, then through Wanaka and up the west coast to Nelson. I will be riding a standard Touring Bike with panniers front and back and 700 x 38C tires. I'm relatively fit (regular fully-loaded imperial centuries) so feel fairly confident that I should be able to average 75km per day on ride days.
Any thoughts/advice? Does this seem reasonable? I was feeling pretty confident until I saw this route on bikepacking.com which looks lovely but the first trail note is that it is only fully passable from May to November, which is full on winter in New Zealand. This is not a crazy plan, right?
by beartums