AKATARAWA GRAVEL FONDO 2020!
IT’S NEARLY HERE!!! A hardy trio of musketeers did a full recce of the route. They also took some photos and came to the unanimous agreement that this is an absolute banger of a route. Comments like “Tolkien country”, “Incredible adventure” and “You’re a crazy bitch” were dropped on the TripAdvisor reviews alongside 5* ratings. You’re in for a treat and guaranteed to discover some new areas of Wellington that you never knew existed (while hopefully staying on course!).
The long & short options both follow the same route out to Paekakariki Hill Rd from da Hutt. The long route is VERY committing from the coast back to the Hutt and is VERY remote. You can always drop to the short route if you aren’t feeling the a hundy once you’ve got the first 30kms under your belt. Always best to live to fight another day.
You’ll be treated to some orienteering clippers en route to prove that you were there and to keep your motivation fire burning. You will even be supplied to a full deep custom card to clip before Le Grand Depart. There are four orienteering clippers deployed on the short route and nine on the long route. There is no assessment at the end. You are literally doing this in order to keep a card with holes in it as a souvenir of a rad day spent on bikes. Said card can then be put up in the garage next to medals and numberboards in honor of your efforts or alternatively kept in your wallet for those special icebreaker convo starters about Bear Grylls style outdoor heroics. Your call.
Overnight stopovers in the Akatarawa Forest are dissuaded although it sounds like some Tour Aotearoa bikepackers intend to do this fully tooled up so make friends with one of them if you need a sleep bag to snuggle in rather than surprising a random pig hunter.
Finally, it’s mandatory to stop for coffee cos this is a gravel ride and to have fun out there. The ethos of this is adventuring on the humble bicycle. We also encourage all gravel fondo riders to grow beards for maximum authenticity.
