• Hi everyone,

    As you all know, Coffee (Dean) passed away a couple of years ago. I am Dean's ex-wife's husband and happen to have spent my career in tech. Over the years, I occasionally helped Dean with various tech issues.

    When he passed, I worked with his kids to gather the necessary credentials to keep this site running. Since then (and for however long they worked with Coffee), Woodschick and Dirtdame have been maintaining the site and covering the costs. Without their hard work and financial support, CafeHusky would have been lost.

    Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been working to migrate the site to a free cloud compute instance so that Woodschick and Dirtdame no longer have to fund it. At the same time, I’ve updated the site to a current version of XenForo (the discussion software it runs on). The previous version was outdated and no longer supported.

    Unfortunately, the new software version doesn’t support importing the old site’s styles, so for now, you’ll see the XenForo default style. This may change over time.

    Coffee didn’t document the work he did on the site, so I’ve been digging through the old setup to understand how everything was running. There may still be things I’ve missed. One known issue is that email functionality is not yet working on the new site, but I hope to resolve this over time.

    Thanks for your patience and support!

New Zealand trip report

JonDirt

JonDirt

Husqvarna
AA Class
I spent a couple of weeks in March riding on the dirt roads in New Zealand on my TE610. I was traveling solo with a tent and sleeping bag, taking it easy, basking in the amazing scenery.

A full trip report, with about 150 photos, maps and blog is at: www.advtrail.com.

Here's a video:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_fqzXYhfC0

Some bike photos:

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One possum discovered my motorcycle by their hole in the middle of the night, and hissed so loudly it startled me. I had no idea what it was, and only learnt it was a possum after talking to several locals. Everyone had a bit of a laugh. There are no dangerous animals in NZ.

Then this little fella came to visit me at Molesworth. Was about four feet away and just watched me.

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Had I just seen your pix I would have thought you were in eastern Oregon / Washington. Looks identical.
 
Yes, I can see Oregon. Also parts that look like the deserts of Nevada, the red earth of Utah, and the mountains of Colorado, all compressed into two tiny islands. Within a few clicks you travel from dry plains:

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to lush rainforest

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Some of the more crinkly parts do look distinctly island-like:

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John,
thanks for sharing the trip :thumbsup:
I love reading or watching trip reports because... those who can not do, read (or watch):p
 
The terrain in this pic does look alot like the terrain here except we trees and lots of vegetation covering the hills ... Our hills may be on 1500' - 2000' high on Cebu with 3100' the highest ...
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For me at least, its always good to see a report on a land I never really pay much attention to ... So its always educational on some level for me to turn my eyes towards different places for a closer view...

You guys are an island :) .. That top land mass looks an awful lot like Ohau, HI ...
new_Zeland.jpg

Looks even more like the Philippines from this view ... Was there any way non-paved ways to cross that mountain range east to west on the west coast of the lower island? Or you you have to drive around it or use cement?

Cool web site and structured very well! I can probably find the answer to my question on there ...
 
Thanks BobPS and Ray_Ray.

If you enjoy maps, http://www.adventureguide.co.nz does a fantastic job listing most of the gravel and 4wd tracks on the South Island, where there are more dirt roads. There are East to West coast passes over the alps, eg Arthurs Pass, but all these are all tarmac now. There are some passes over smaller mountain ranges that are still gravel eg Danseys pass.

Many of the scenic and interesting offroad rides are daytrips up a dirt track and back again, so you tend to link these daytrips together with tarmac sections to make a longer ride. There are few opportunities to go long distance on dirt these days.
 
JonDirt said:
Thanks BobPS and Ray_Ray.

If you enjoy maps, http://www.adventureguide.co.nz does a fantastic job listing most of the gravel and 4wd tracks on the South Island, where there are more dirt roads. There are East to West coast passes over the alps, eg Arthurs Pass, but all these are all tarmac now. There are some passes over smaller mountain ranges that are still gravel eg Danseys pass.

Many of the scenic and interesting offroad rides are daytrips up a dirt track and back again, so you tend to link these daytrips together with tarmac sections to make a longer ride. There are few opportunities to go long distance on dirt these days.
Click to expand...

That web site is very cool also! ... New Zealand is setup to welcome bikers and others from around the world to their somewhat exotic home\country ....

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I've looked at maps of this place here for a few yrs now, and I can totally understand your words on the trips out into the mountains and back out ... Civilization only builds roads where they are needed and IF the terrain allows it ... The terrain on the island of Pinay on the west cost in the Antique province is just about identical to New Zealand with a mountain range dividing the island into 2 types of riding.

Yep, your brown rolling hills look just like eastern WA state.
 
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