CURVESCOUT / MOTORCYCLE RIDE
Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
A proper escape from Auckland with roads worth waking up for. Out of Auckland and back again: 546 km, roughly 7 h 01 in the saddle. It goes by way of Hamilton and Taupo. It was put together for the scenery rather than the shortest line.
Auckland is built on a volcanic field. More than fifty cones and craters, some now covered in grass and sheep, others in houses, stand across the narrow isthmus between two harbours, the Waitematā to the north and the Manukau to the south. The Māori name for the city, Tāmaki Makaurau, is often translated as Tāmaki desired by many, a nod to the fertile soil and the sea on either side that made it a prized place to live long before Europeans arrived. The largest cones, such as Maungawhau, Mount Eden, and Maungakiekie, One Tree Hill, still carry the terraces of old fortified villages.
Hamilton straddles the Waikato River, New Zealand's longest, in the middle of some of the richest dairy country on earth. It is the country's fourth-largest city, a university and agricultural research town, and it is often treated by passing travellers as somewhere to get through on the way to somewhere else. That is a little unfair, but on a ride to Taupō it is mostly what it is: a place to fill the tank, eat something and get back on the road.
The lake at Taupō is so big and so calm on a still morning that it is hard to believe what it actually is: the flooded crater of one of the most violent volcanoes on the planet. Around 25,500 years ago, the Oruanui eruption blew out an enormous volume of rock and ash, and the collapse formed much of the basin the lake now fills. Then, roughly 1,800 years ago, the Hatepe eruption sent ash and pumice across the North Island and, according to some accounts, coloured sunsets as far away as Rome and China. Lake Taupō, the largest lake in New Zealand, sits in that scar.
Return visit. Read the place description above.