Pedalling Aotearoa

It took me a few days to settle back into Italy, not just physically. It wasn't easy to get used to the routine again, to home, to the polluted grey sky, to the mountains around me, to the winter cold and... to the usual Italian arguments and political wars! After two days I already regretted having come back: one glance at the TV news was enough to understand that nothing had changed in a year of absence: tits and arses first, then our own domestic politics, and every now and then a flash from the world. The only solution was to switch off the TV, leave the house and meet old friends and relatives: pleasant days that brought my mind back to Italy too. To put behind me, at least for the moment, this splendid year down under and the last two months on a bicycle, I wrote down at a stretch what I remembered of New Zealand, without re-reading the miles of diary I had written.

Just like that...to see what has stayed with me from these islands at the antipodes. What follows is the result...

Carving Kia Ora... Welcome: Pronounced features, olive skin, statuesque bodies and conspicuous tattoos covering their faces. They are the Maori, the first human beings to have reached these islands in the middle of the Pacific and to have colonised them. Today they welcome me with a smile on their face and a shouted greeting: Kia Ora-Welcome! Dance holds a prominent place in their culture, and even warriors before battles would put on a dance to demonstrate their virility to rival tribes. Today the "Haka" is the battle cry of the national rugby team, the legendary All Blacks of New Zealand (once again defeated prematurely in last year's World Cup). It is she, Aotearoa, the land of the long white cloud, who has revealed to me her beauties, her hilly landscapes framed by isolated sea views.

A cyclist's paradise: Taupo Four million inhabitants over a territory roughly the size of Italy, New Zealand's roads are the ideal terrain for lovers of two wheels, and this is why in recent years it has become the cyclists' paradise. You meet them by the dozen, from the most prepared and meticulous to the most disorganised and relaxed. With gleaming new bikes or old frames that struggle to stay upright. In the evening at the campsites people gather, exchange information about the road and share a laugh together. By day you pedal, greet each other, help each other if needed, but you are often alone and immersed in the peace of the nature that dominates these lands.

The power of the earth: The rocks are painted in a thousand different colours depending on the minerals contained in the waters that gush from the many springs. The white steam rising from the thousand craters blends with the candid clouds to create strange imaginary figures against the blue backdrop of the sky. Te Puia, Pohutu, Te Wairoa, Wakarewarewa, Waimangu, Wai-o-tapu...complicated, convoluted, sometimes unpronounceable names. Names of mysterious places where the gods of earth, water and fire have created one of their most grandiose works. Fumaroles, pools of boiling mud, hot springs, geysers. Bodies of water coloured like the palette of a painter about to paint a neorealist picture, and the sunlight that lights up everything as it passes through the smoke that veils and softens the background: flowers, leaves, shrubs, water, rocks light up like precious gems.

The spider's web Imprisoned in the web: Morning awakening: the humidity can be cut with a knife. The sun, at first timid and then ever more confident, dissolves the low fog that envelops everything. A spider's web, the dewdrops deposited on it during the night, the slanting rays striking them and splitting the light into the primary colours: a work of art that keeps me imprisoned among its spirals for hours.

The pearl of Te Urewera: The asphalt ends suddenly, behind a bend, a small road sign warning of the start of an odyssey: "Gravel road" it says. But it hides much more. From here you enter a different world, isolated and happy to be so. Te Urewera National Park can be crossed only on foot or along this artery of rocks and dust: ninety kilometres among hills and coniferous forests to reach the shores of Lake Waikaremoana, a pearl set in the heart of the park.

From cone to cone: Volcanoes, perfect cones and endless slopes. Mists and perennial snows, lava rocks black as pitch and impossible trails that climb the slopes of Tongariro National Park, and further west Taranaki, isolated and imposing, also hidden by the low blanket of cloud. Between them kilometres by bike, the Whanganui valley, and the joy of being immersed in complete solitude, in a kind of spiritual journey, an appointment between me and nature... my nature and everyone's.

The South Island: Milford Sound Traffic-free roads connect small, warm towns, all with one- or two-storey buildings. Between them the forest seems to swallow the road, the rivers seem ready to sweep away the bridges crossing them at any moment, and the rain makes the landscape brilliantly green and the going icy and arduous. Flightless birds and possums furtively cross the roads, chasing one another in the eternal struggle between prey and predators. The often inaccessible bays of the southern coast are the ideal shelter for shy animals such as penguins and the favourite playground of the friendliest dolphins and the enterprising sea lions.

Boiling ice: Ice dominates the panorama beyond the horizon. New Zealand's highest peaks are reflected in lakes of crystal-clear water. The ocean, not far away, receives the rivers that descend first violent and roaring, then placid and silent, swallowing them like a voracious bottomless well. Global warming has not spared even this corner of the world at the end of the world. The ice is retreating and yet it is still there, not far from the coastline, almost down to sea level. Its face is high but fragile; helicopters shuttle constantly from their hangars up high, up to Tasman and Cook, the two explorers who discovered this marvel and who now live on, carved forever in the name of these rocks as imposing as the Dolomites.

A tribute to Sir Edmund: The high peaks of the Southern Alps were for years the training ground of Sir Edmund Hillary, the man who in 1953 was the first to conquer Everest with his Sherpa companion Tenzing. Fate willed that I reached the village at the foot of Mt Cook just a couple of days after the climber's death, a national hero not only for his mountain exploits but also and above all for his social commitment to helping the peoples who are guardians of those white giants that gave him so much. I walk among these peaks with a thought for him and for them: honour to Sir Edmund.

Haere mai Aotearoa: Thousands of kilometres are behind me, hundreds of people met, dozens of national parks visited. All in the saddle of a bicycle, all for the pure pleasure of getting to know and see the world. Time will fade the images, confuse names and visions, but it will never erase the memory of a distant land, cold and warm at the same time. It will not erase the last days spent among whales and dolphins, before boarding a plane that took me far from the long white cloud that looms over this land at the antipodes.

My book Pedalando Aotearoa - L'isola del Nord, about the first month spent in New Zealand, is now available free of charge on my blog.