Hello, we are Richard and Claire from Gatineau, Québec, Canada. We are experienced riders in North America who travelled from East to West across Canada and the US, and from Alaska to California to Louisiana.

We left home on January 25, 2017 for a six-month motorcycle trip in New Zealand and Australia. Our travel plan is quite open with only one flight booked to Christchurch, NZ and return from Melbourne, OZ mid-July. We have limited camping gear and we usually never know in the morning where our journey will take us. It depends on the weather and recommendations from local people. We have a good Nikon camera with us as well as a GoPro camera but this equipment is brand new for us and we’re currently learning how to manage the images captured along the way.

We have purchased two motorcycles just before our arrival in Christchurch, thanks to Nigel, super moderator on the HUBB. Claire has a BMW F650GS and Richard has a Suzuki DL650 V-Strom that we intend to sell in 4 to 6 weeks. We plan to visit both islands and return to Christchurch before flying to Australia.

Our first impressions are that the vegetation and weather here are quite different and varies depending on which side of the Alps you are. At a few occasions, we encountered very strong winds with gust up to 100 km/h making the ride quite difficult. However, we found a lot of fantastic twisty roads to ride in the mountains with very good pavement condition. Also, there is no need to talk about the beauty of the landscape… as you will notice in the pictures below.

Some of the challenges so far are the difficulty to charge our electronic equipment like laptop, cell phones, camera, GoPro and GPS. Communications are limited due to lack of free Wi-Fi and cell phone coverage in certain areas. We noticed that cost of life is higher here, especially for gas, which may be more than twice what we pay in Canada.

Our intention is to present some videos on this thread along with some pictures. However, a challenge we face is the lack of space on our hard drive to store all those images. During an attempt to free up some space, we accidentally deleted some files related to the 3 first episodes of our trip; therefore they are unavailable for now. If we find the time, we will try to recreate those first episodes and post them later on. Meanwhile, we have selected a few of the best pictures covering the very first couple of days of our trip.

Christchurch – January 27-28, 2017
Re: START Mall
DSC_0015 by Claire Girard, sur Flickr