Back to biking... Arrowtown to Lumsden to Gore

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Started heading south again on Wednesday. Caught a ride with some people I met at the hostel for the first 40km... weather was too cold in the morning to do the entire ride to Lumsden. Worked out really well though because a couple of backpackers at the hostel had been working there for a few weeks but were all leaving Monday too. It is a fair bit colder on the South Island than it was up north.

Old steam train... still runs on half-hour journeys. It passed me at some point during the day.

Name of train is the Kingston Flyer.

On Tuesday I took a small detour east to check out the town of Gore, famous for three things: a small airport which spends most of its time repairing vintage airplanes, a musuem that extensively details the region's moonshine involvement, and it is the brown trout fishing capital of New Zealand. The airport was really neat; the hangar where guys were working on restoring the aircraft was open and you could just walk around and look at all the airplanes they had. Apparently there was an airshow there a few weeks ago but I missed that. There were a number of planes that were being worked on when I was there- some were nothing more than a wooden frame and engine, others were just getting minor repair work done. One of the guys at the hostel I stayed at on Tuesday night was a pilot who had flown in to get his plane checked out for maintanence, so the airport does still do a pretty good business apparently.

Many of the first European immigrants to this region were of Scottish heritage, so when they came to the region they naturally brought some stills with them. Prohibition then started becoming a big deal in the mid to late 1800s so there were a couple close encounters with the law. The exhibits at the musuem made a big deal of pointing out how the police who came to confiscate the stills were often keen to taste the moonshine, just to be sure that what they were confiscating was truly illegal, of course.