Almost every multi-day cycling route sold as accessible is not. The distance looks reasonable, the profile promises 'gentle gradients' and by the third day it turns out there is a pass to climb. If you have never done a cycling trip and have no stamina, the reasonable doubt is whether you will finish it.
In the interior of Otago there is a route where that doubt does not apply, and not through anyone's goodwill: for a technical reason. The path was not laid out by a cycling club. It was laid out by a railway company at the start of the twentieth century, and a steam locomotive does not climb hills.
01 A locomotive decided the gradient
The Otago Central Rail Trail occupies the formation of the old Otago Central Railway, the line that linked Dunedin with the interior. It reached Clyde in April 1907 and Cromwell in July 1921, 236 kilometres in all. The section between Middlemarch and Clyde closed on 30 April 1990.
What was left was a 150-kilometre strip of ground with a very uncommon property: a gradient designed to haul loaded wagons. Middlemarch sits at 201 metres of altitude and the highest point of the route, between Ranfurly and Oturehua, at 618. That is 417 metres of climbing spread over 150 kilometres.
Translated: under three metres of ascent per kilometre on average. There is not a single stretch where the gradient will force you off the bike, because if a steam train could not manage it, it is not there. That is the whole explanation of why this route works for someone who never rides.
02 A hundred and fifty kilometres and sixteen stops
The route runs from Middlemarch to Clyde and follows, one by one, the line's old stations: Middlemarch, Ngapuna, Rock and Pillar, Hyde, Tiroiti, Kokonga, Waipiata, Ranfurly, Wedderburn, Oturehua, Ida Valley, Auripo, Lauder, Omakau, Chatto Creek, Galloway, Alexandra and Clyde.
That list is the route's logistical advantage. A railway places its stops at regular distances, because that is how the service worked, and it means the stages are already laid out: you do not have to calculate where to sleep or where to eat, only decide how many stops you want to make in a day.
The landscape it crosses is that of the Otago interior: broad tussock basins, the yellow clumped grass, closed in by ranges with horizontal summits. It is not a mountain route; it is a route through the flats between mountains, which is a different thing and explains the profile.
03 Tunnels, viaducts and a gorge
What keeps the route from becoming monotonous is the inherited engineering. There are three tunnels: two in the Poolburn gorge and Prices Creek. And there are several large viaducts, the best known being Poolburn, an iron structure on stone piers that crosses the gorge at a considerable height.
The Poolburn gorge is the star stretch and the figures confirm it: it is the most popular section of the whole route, with some 24,000 users a year. There the alignment leaves the open basins and enters a schist cut, with the path carved into the slope and the viaduct and tunnels one after another.
If a loaded steam train could not manage that hill, the hill is not there.
The rest of the path crosses rivers that carry little water in summer. From some viaducts you can see the bed of the Manuherikia with its gravel bars exposed, which is the exact image of a climate that evaporates more than it receives.
04 The climate is on your side
The second argument in this route's favour is the climate, and here the figures are conclusive. Alexandra, at the western end of the route, gets 365.1 millimetres of rain a year spread over 66.2 days, and accumulates 2,065.5 hours of sunshine. It is the driest interior in New Zealand.
Translated into cycling days: it rains a little under six days a month on average, and when it rains the amounts are small. The month with the most days of precipitation is May, with 6.8; the fewest, August, with 4.2. Rain is not the variable that will ruin your plan.
What can ruin it is cold and lack of light. From June to August average lows are below zero and June totals 84 hours of sunshine for the whole month, under three a day. This route is ridden from November to March, when there are between 181 and 253 hours of sunshine a month and highs run from 21.3 to 25.3 degrees.
05 Three days, five days or on foot
The full route takes three to five days by bike, and five to seven on foot. With 150 kilometres and this profile, five days works out at thirty kilometres a day: a quiet morning with the afternoon free in town. Three days works out at fifty, which is demanding only for the time in the saddle.
Visitor numbers are also worth knowing. Between 10,000 and 12,000 people ride the full route each year, and up to 80,000 ride individual sections. In other words: the route is alive and has services, but it is not crowded except in the Poolburn gorge.
The path also has a place in the history of local cycle touring: it was the one that inspired New Zealand's national cycle trail network, which it formally joined in 2012.
06 How the trip is put together
Five days is the split that works best for this profile, and it is better done from Middlemarch to Clyde than the other way round: that way the climb to 618 metres falls in the first days, with fresh legs, and the rest of the route drops towards the Clutha basin.
On kit: it is 150 kilometres of gravel, so the bike wants wide tyres, and the tunnels are unlit, so a front light is not optional. And because of the continental climate, even if the day's high is 25 degrees, January's low is 10.8: a warm layer goes in the bag.
What makes this route special is not that it is beautiful, which it is, but that it solves a specific problem. Someone who does not cycle does not need a shorter route: they need a route without hills. And an abandoned railway line is, by definition, exactly that.
