Friday 20th.
I left Alexandra at 08:30 on a beautiful day with plenty of sun and only a light breeze. It was still slightly cool, so I had on all my thermal gear and the bike was only lightly loaded with all personal gear split between my two panniers, and bike gear in a tank bag where a top box would normally sit. Traffic was light and it only took 90 minutes to get to Twizel and my first fuel stop. Whilst here I discovered that I hadn't reset my GPS to get the exact distance, so I took the opportunity to zero out my trip meter and GPS. I just had to remember to add 140 km to both at the end of the ride.
I took a break for an early lunch at Geraldine, then north to Mayfield and the long straight Thompson's Track road to SH1. I was very suprised to discover that the turn-off at Hornby was virtually gridlocked at 1:30 in the afternoon, and it took almost 30 minutes to negotiate the bypass to Belfast.
On the Christchurch motorway I noticed that my radar detector was picking up a cop on the Ka band, but my screamer wasn't giving any noise. I figured that the screamer battery must be low, so when I stopped in Amberley for fuel I bought a new battery at the same time. I didn't want to block the forecourt whilst I took the front fairing off to get at the screamer, so I carried on north to a rest area near Cheviot where I stopped to work on the problem. After removing the screamer I found that the self test button still gave adequate noise, and that pointed to a problem with the wiring. I soon worked out that it was a broken wire in the 3.5 mm plug, and without a soldering iron I couldn't carry out a proper repair. I did mange to wiggle the wire into a position where it appeared to work, so I carefully put everything back together and carried on.
After that rather long stop I arrived in Kaikoura at 4:30 pm and booked myself into the Lyall Creek Backpackers. This place is at the upper end of the backpacker spectrum and it was more like a boutique hotel than a backpackers; very comfortable and everything was provided.
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