Pencarrow lighthouse

My right knee is a delightful shade of mauve and blueberry, and looks as if it's been rubbed a few times with the cheese grater. This was escaping lightly, at one stage hanging off a sheer cliff with only my bike as a life line, I could have very easily dropped hundreds of feet to my death. Or rolled a wee bit down the gully before I got snagged in a gorse bush.

Becky and Jason collected me Sunday morning with one bike already in the car, the other two soon followed (with a special ladies one for me says the bike boy, yeah thanks very much I just gave you 40 bucks damn right I want a girl seat) and we were off driving round the bay to Eastbourne and just constantly blurting out stuff like, "what a beautiful day" and "the weather's so perfect" etc etc. And it was. Not a whisper of wind and the sun radiating off the water in complete defiance of July. I was getting quite jiggly with excitement in the back seat as we pulled in to the carpark, not having had much mountain biking experience (I've never even owned a bike with gears, having grown up on a place where the road was three quarters of a kilometre away and a state highway once you got there, us kids' bikes were fair dinkum farm bikes).

Jason was very sweet with both us girls, showing us how brakes and gears worked, adjusting seats and lifting bikes over gates and watching attentively to make sure neither of us needed our licences revoked as we peddled off in the direction of the lighthouse. We followed the coast almost the entire three and a half hour trip, and the sea was just stunning, completely at ease and basking contentedly in the sunshine. It wasn't long before I had to strip my thermal off and with it went any repressed tension and worries. I just couldn't stop smiling.

We hadn't gotten far and Jason, (who must have been finding the pace a bit sedate), spotted an extremely steep and narrow path up to the first lighthouse, over mountain and dale we shimmied up with the bikes, yodelling at the goats and gasping for breath, until we got to a wider less sheer track where we could ride again. And where I almost met my demise. Jason gave me clear instructions on the gear setting (I still don't really get it, is top gear the easy one?) and a pep talk and my little legs started peddling furiously and I think I remember voices from behind saying, she's doing it, she's making it, and I really was, and then some distance from the top I just kind of crapped out, and I went to hop off and sorta toppled sideways taking the bike with me and shrieked and slid a bit down the bank so I was almost in the gorse and spreadeagled on my face. I think Becky and Jase probably felt at that early stage that it had been worth bringing me all this way. I got up smartly, still smiling, and walked the bike the rest of the way up the hill.

The cast iron Pencarrow Lighthouse was the first permanent lighthouse to be built in New Zealand and was run by New Zealand's only woman lighthouse-keeper, Mrs Bennett. The cast iron tower was made in England and then erected on Pencarrow Head, at the entrance to Wellington Harbour in 1859. It remained operational until 18 June, 1935 when it was replaced by an automated light erected at Baring Head east of Pencarrow. The Pencarrow Lighthouse was offered to the New Zealand Historic Places Trust in 1966, and the Trust has maintained the building ever since. It is now a popular destination for hikers and bikers, and is surrounded by a recreational reserve.

The view from the lighthouse was spectacular. Maybe not the elevation you get from Mount Vic, but 360 degrees and completely devoid of any blatant blight of humanity on the landscape. Just the ocean and a rugged shoreline and rustic farmland and a glittering Wellington Harbour with a tiny toy version of the city in the distance. We could have plugged Becky in to the lighthouse and powered it, she was glowing like a light bulb, I was trying not to rub my knee to salvage the residue of my pride, Jason was running around with characteristic exuberance planning bbqs in the summer and snapping pics, and then we were off downhill, fishtailing it in the gravel on the steep bits I struggled to get the right balance between front and back brakes, Becky zoomed off ahead, with me a little more cautious now bringing up the rear, Jason staying in the middle ostensibly trying to keep an eye on both of us girls. Then we hit lower ground and softer turf and we were all flying over the dips, racing along past a little lake with black swans sailing about. Before too long we came out on to our original track trailing the shore.

We did see the shipwreck we'd been promised a bit further up. It was a boring old rusty metal skeleton that was nothing like the gigantic wooden treasure chests that the word 'shipwreck' conjures in my mind. Actually I think shipwreck, I think that movie The Goonies. God that was a brilliant film. Then we reached a point where our asses needed a break and we stopped for ham rolls with mandarins and cookie bear mini 100s and 1000s and a dash of beach baseball (aka me with a hefty stick and some pebbles, missing 90%). We saw scant few people biking this far out, definitely none walking. On the return journey we were bemused by cows sunning themselves on the beach, far from any pasture and looking quite peculiar. Becky nearly crapped off a couple of times, forgetting she needed two hands to balance and being milimetres from taking me out at one stage. Jason subsequently relegated us to opposite sides of the track and withdrew her bell ringing privileges.

I don't know how far we went, bad with distances, I think Jason said about 40kms, and yet it flew past and we got back to the car park and I just wanted to keep going. But we piled the bikes on the back and removed gloves and helmets to reveal sweaty hat hair and headed home, feeling ever so zen, until we were on the motorway and Jason had to invoke his emergency services training when one of the bikes came detached from the rack and hung precariously out in to the other lane. I actually thought we'd lost it completely at first. We screamed over in to the shoulder and Jason dashed out in to the traffic which sped past seemingly oblivious to the flashing hazard lights and the fire-engine-red-haired man frantically trying to tie the bike back on.

He succeeded, we dropped the bikes off intact, and made it safely home to our hot showers and lazy boys. I had the most fantastic time, thank you both!