I received a flyer in the mail from Kathmandu last week, in which I found a small compact tent weighing in at 1.8kgs. Well I’ve been looking around for this type of thing for a while now, so after responsibly waiting until pay day and completing the purchase, it would have been criminal not to make use of the beautiful Easter weekend weather we had and head out into the unknown.
We were Auckland bound for most of the break but packed up the Sprint with our new luggage (also added were two bedrolls with 50% markdown) on Sunday, and were very pleased to find the tent could be packed into the main pannier with no issues. A friend of mine had talked to me about the remote tip of the Coromandel, so after searching the DOC sites we settled on Port Jackson as our destination.
The weather was fantastic and the ride up to the Coromandel was pleasant for the most part, our buttocks and my wrists being the only complainants. It has been a few months since we had saddled up for any extended distance and our road hardiness has definitely worn off some what. We took the main route to the Coromandel, then turned north up to Colville before tackling the last 30kms on gravel. I quite enjoy riding on the gravel, even with a full load and a pillion, so wasn’t phased when it came up. I find as long as you take it slow and give anything ahead of you good spacing it’s quite pleasant.
We pulled up to the DOC site on Sunday afternoon and put up the new tent, inflated the new bedrolls and settled in right on the sea side for a nice few hours in the sun reading the paper with our solitary beer each (it’s all we could fit!). A lovely stroll along the coast in the evening lead to dinner time, for which I made a fire and heated up our Saturday night leftovers wrapped in tinfoil on. It really was bliss.
Our office bound bodies are not really up to sleeping on thin bedrolls so close to the earth, with every slight nuance in the surface gaining agonising significance by about 4am, so the sleeping component of the journey left something to be desired! I’m sure with some time and practice it would become bareable, but for someone accustomed to a nice comfy mattress it is a quite a shock to the system.
We packed up early and headed back home, stopping in one of our favourite restaurants of all time The Pepper Tree for breakfast, before skipping all the queues on our way back home.
All in all I’d say Port Jackson is beautiful, and DOC camp sites are right up there for destination choices compared to the more commercial offerings you find these days.
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