NzoLand

Let's go bike camping!

A brief ride report: over the break I tried to ride as many different bikes as I could. One of them is the semi-fat tyred, fully rigid beast I acquired many years ago for a Tour Aotearoa I didn’t do.

Mountain is dirty and dangerous. Until it isn't.

There are numerous things to note about life in a bike town. Many you might expect. More bike shops, and better ones, than you would normally see in a regional town.

It's not about the bike

The Forest Loop is a thing that has been developed in my home town of Rotorua which gives more or less anybody a decent serve of the splendours of the location without being particularly challenging.

Grab a bike. Any bike.

An apology to customers from the United States of America

We are very sorry (and grumpy) to announce that for the time being we can no longer send things to the USA. 

Insert here

A minor part of a recent project was extending a wifi network. I bought a device which has no other purpose for its existence, and put aside half an hour one evening to give the little unit its opportunity to shine.

Weather forecasts and reality

Big weekend in Rotorua

Whakarewarewa Forest near Rotorua is not that big. Only about six kilometres from one side to the other, and not much longer than that north to south, it contains hundreds of kilometres of forestry roads and trails for walking or running, horse riding, and best of all, bike riding.

Coronet Loop is a great day out

One of the best bike days I have been lucky enough to score this year, and there have been a few, was away down south near Queenstown. The Coronet Loop is a fifty kilometre trail best accessed from Arrowtown.

Selective Memory

Fresh trails are hard to beat

Even when the principal activities are sitting around looking at a stonkingly beautiful view, and then wandering out into it, there are a some things that are arguably better.

Mountain biking. It's awesome.

The Old Ghost Road version 2

As reported previously, last autumn I finally got the chance to ride the Old Ghost Road. I liked it so much I organised a rematch a month later. It turned out slightly differently, but just as good.

Tasmania: an Nzo Field Trip

In late spring, Nzo took a long-overdue trip to Tasmania. The party was Craig and me, and we were heading to Tassie to have a look around and do some bike rides.

The History of Dobies

While fossicking through some archive folders in a search for something - I don’t remember what - I found two interesting relics from prehistory. One is the original drawing outlining what would become Nzo Dobies. I will come to the other in a few hundred words’ time.

A funny thing happened

How to get sponsored

Even a small mountain bike apparel brand adrift in the South Seas gets its fair share of sponsorship proposals. None of them offering to sponsor us. 

Work / Ride / Lie down

The Paparoa Track

Swapping bikes for carpets

During the early nineties we spent a couple of years living in a VW Kombi. That little bus took us from San Francisco to eastern Turkey, before we doubled back to Germany where we parted ways.

What I reckon

Top of the South

Almost two months since I reckoned I would report on a recent mountain biking trip in this blog, I am only now getting around to it. I am getting to it now because we are sitting in our little caravan in a tiny but excellent campground while the weather goes from bad to really bad.

Chance meetings in the woods

A new year, same old stunts

Probably the highlight of my summer break was a visit from our son. I showed him around the new trails that have been created since his previous appearance, staying off the especially rowdy ones

Return to Taupo

This weekend, for the first time in a few years, I am going to ride around Lake Taupo. Covid and cancer got in the way of a 22 year run broken only once, when a sort of dance mishap resulted in a toenail being peeled off.

The Pearl Pass Tour and me

We rode SlickRock several times, including one lap after midnight under a full moon. No lights, just following the white painted dots on the rock that mark the trail.

Marlborough Sounds Getaway

Picton is a town most people like passing through. As the ferry terminal for the South Island, travel in either direction involves Picton. If you are a lucky Northerner arriving in the South Island, it is a sort of welcome sign that flashes past as soon  as you can hit the road out.

Us and them

Here is a snapshot of what separates us from the normal people. By ‘us’ I mean people who ride bikes - doesn’t matter for now what kind or where we go - and by normal people I mean that grey horde living sad, meaningless existences without bikes.

The Staycation

Every so often we discuss how to turn a regular old outing in your local hang-out into something more memorable. Well, here’s another way we discovered over the extended weekend: the Staycation.

Dirt... the new sand

The life cycle of a t shirt

Part one: Mid-ride, mid-shower, mid-life; take your pick. An idea pops into being. It gets drawn on whatever comes to hand, in the sort of short hand usually used by doctors.

The never-ending N+1

A couple of weeks ago the stars aligned and I added two new bikes to the stable at once. By a combination of circumstances that are best left unexplored, I stepped up to a brand new trail bike. Part of that exciting transaction was keeping all of my previous trail bike except the frame.

Mountain biking culture... is there one?

It just didn’t look ‘right’. The sight of this gang made both of us happy - they were out in the woods, on bikes, having fun. It also made us raise our eyebrows, and wonder what it meant for the ‘culture’. 

The big bad Rail 9.8

A recent Nzo newsletter (you really should subscribe) referenced a review produced for NZ Mountain Biker magazine. A flurry of responses from readers asked what the bike was we had reviewed. By permission of the magazine, here is what we wrote:

25 Years of Dirtwear

This week marks the 25th Anniversary of the day Nzo opened for business. More or less. There is always plenty of wiggle room in discussions about when we got started, because we actually started thinking about something along the lines of Nzo when were wandering around the planet during the early nineties.

We found a love letter

We went looking for an email about something or other, and accidentally found this entry, from one of our first customers. He penned it back in 2005, i.e two years before the first iPhone, when Nzo was still N-Zone.

Craters of the Moon

Mountain biking is a sport where some of the people who do it provide the facilities. Most other sports use places created for the purpose by authorities, or they operate in nature.

How not to win friends, nor influence people.

During a short spell between cyclones, we went over to the coast to do a few errands. I had a spare half hour so I went to the sat in a cafe to watch a heated altercation.

First World Problems

We currently share a house with my very inspiring brother-in-law. He is 84, and right now he is training for a South Island bike trip he has signed up for. In general he is one of the more positive people I have ever met, but he is also given to being glass-half-empty on certain subjects.

To E or not to E?

Elsewhere in this very magazine (er, blog), I wrote a piece about my time aboard the Trek EX e, my first extended period atop an electric-assist machine. I finished by saying “when I get one”.

The mountain biker's E bike?

This is a review of the Trek Fuel EXe, a great example of a new category of mountain bike. It will not be like any review you have read before.