Student On Cycle Tour Of N.Z. Arrives In City

Press, Volume C, Issue 29509, 10 May 1961, Page 7

Student On Cycle Tour Of N.Z. Arrives In City

A youth who has saved all his holidays for four years and a-half to travel around New Zealand on a bicycle, arrived in Christchurch on Monday. He is Mr Hans Aalders, of Auckland, a 19-year-old accountancy student, who is on the last leg of his tour of the South Island. He left Auckland on January 4 and travelled down the west coast of the North Island to Wellington where he stayed for nine weeks. He then crossed to Picton and went down the west coast of the South Island to Bluff The return journey will be done on the east coasts of both islands. Mr Aalders thinks he will be the only person to have done the round trip of New Zealand on a bicycle. The statistics of Mr Aalders’s journey so far are: number of days spent cycling, 28; average miles cycled in a day, about 60; number of miles so far travelled, 2400; number of miles travelled when he arrives back in Auckland, 4500.

Mr Aalders said farmers had been very generous in giving him sheds to sleep in during < his travelling although he had slept occasionally in railway stations. Automobile Association camps and even in Maori pas. Bread had been his main food and a transistor radio fixed to his cycle had relieved the boredom of the “long runs,” he said. His cycle weighs 951 b when loaded. The highlight of his tour so far has been a message' of good will which the Mayor of Bluff asked him to deliver to the Mayor of Kaitaia as a message from the southernmost borough in the British Commonwealth to the northernmost borough in New Zealand. Mr Aalders is touring because he intends to become a naturalised New Zealander at the end of the year and before doing so wants to see New Zealand and New Zealanders.