Travel: Meatloaf with midges in the monsoon: The torrential rains and sandflies were bad enough, but New Zealand's non-stop pop music was too much for Paul Buttle

I shook my head in disbelief. The previous night it had lashed down with rain, then all through the following day it had rained on and off, and now, just as the day was drawing to a close, it was pouring harder than ever, thudding on the roof of Graham's dilapidated car as if it might tear through it. 'Graham,' I said in mounting desperation, 'this rain is monsoonal.' Graham looked somewhat hurt. He was a local, a genuine Coaster, one of the few New Zealanders mad enough to live in Westland, the west coast of South Island.

'Well,' he said defensively, 'it is a rainforest.'

Indeed it was. All around us was a near-impenetrable jungle. The west coast of the South Island, from the tip to the bottom, is all lush sub-tropical rainforest, a wondrous phenomenon, a naturalist's paradise, but also extremely wet and grindingly dull to cycle through. Yet cycling through it was exactly what I had been doing day after day.

Above the tree-line, of course, there were some impressive peaks, the Southern Alps, including Mount Cook. But I saw practically nothing of them, as they were nearly always shrouded in mist or hidden by the continual rain of Westland. I knew they were there, only because I saw them on postcards, whose pictures showed not a wisp of a cloud.

One of the usual pleasures of cycling is to stop every now and then at some place of refreshment, say a pub or a small cafe. But New Zealand offers little opportunity for this. Fewer than a million people live in South Island, an area the size of England; and with more than half the population living in either Christchurch or Dunedin, the greater part of the island is virtually empty. One day I cycled 35 miles, expecting to satisfy my hunger and thirst at an isolated roadside cafe about which I had been told, only to find it was closed for a holiday. I then had to pedal another 35 miles to the next one.

Nor was the finding of a cafe or a pub necessarily a joyous event, thanks to the country's obsession with pop music. It is played nearly everywhere: modern, noisy, pop music. In Napier, which was entirely rebuilt in Art Deco style in the Thirties, following an earthquake, and which has palm trees growing in its main street, I longed to find at least one bar where music was played in keeping with the town's elegant ambience. Instead, I found them all playing Meatloaf, or whatever.

I asked several people if there was anywhere that did not play pop music. They all thought hard, and offered the same answer: the wine bar. It was true, there was no pop music in the wine bar; instead, a man and woman played some pleasing Irish folk music. But in Napier, no pop music means no customers - or almost none. There were six people in the wine bar, including the folk duo.

Of course, as I was camping I could always brew up on my stove by some babbling brook. But this was never an inviting prospect, for among the thick forests of Westland lurks one of the most fiendish creatures: the sandfly. The problem is that it is not just a sandfly; in Westland it is an everywherefly. This is because most of its life cycle goes on under water, of which in Westland there is no shortage.

Sandflies are as ubiquitous as the Highland midge, and just as voracious for human blood. But although they are hardly bigger than a midge, their bite is far worse, more like that of a horsefly, and can irritate for days. It is almost impossible to resist scratching a sandfly bite, so eventually you end up with masses of little scabs and sores.

After all the rain, the sameness of the forest and the constant presence of the sandflies, I could not wait to see the last of Westland, and the end came as dramatically and as decisively as I was told it would, once I turned eastwards and crossed over the Haast Pass. The pass is a fearsome gap in the Southern Alps. As I began the ascent of it, water (it was raining in buckets) cascaded down the sheer rock cliffs that bound each side of the road. It was difficult to believe the road could lead anywhere but up to a mountain summit, but lead somewhere it did. It passed through a narrow cleft, into a land where it did not rain (well, only lightly), where the hills were covered with tussock grass and where, blessing of blessings, there were no sandflies.

All went well for the next few days, until I made the mistake of going to Queenstown. They really should change the name to Berserksville. The town is like some ghastly fairground. People arrive there and seem to go crazy. Instead of wanting to contemplate the quiet beauty of the place, they are evidently infected with a passion for riding on the noisiest machines invented, and terrifying themselves half to death. They tear round on jet-boats or in aeroplanes, or go hurtling down rapids in rubber dinghies. Worst of all, they develop this mad desire to jump off things. Chiefly they jump from bridges but recently they have begun jumping from helicopters. Imagine paying to go in a helicopter, not to see anything but to jump out of it with an elastic band tied to your feet.

It was also in Queenstown, I found, that the country's devotion to pop music reached its nadir. I trailed vainly from cafe to cafe, hoping to find a quiet one. I even went in to a Japanese restaurant hoping to avoid this relentless emission of pop (a sizeable proportion of New Zealand's tourists are Japanese and you see far more signs written in Japanese than you do in Maori). But it was no good. 'Why can't you play Japanese music?' I asked the owner plaintively, but I do not think he understood me.

Back at the youth hostel, it was even worse: there they had a tannoy system playing the local pop radio station throughout the building. All in all, I was keen to leave Queenstown, but in this I was thwarted.

I had intended to abandon my cycle for a few days to go walking in the mountains. I hired a rucksack, bought food and booked my transport. The evening before I left, however, it began to rain. It rained fairly heavily with lightning and thunder. After my experience in Westland, I assumed this was just typical Kiwi weather, but the next 24 hours were the wettest on record for Queenstown. I awoke in the morning to my first State of Emergency. Bridges had been washed away, and huge landslips had blocked roads. Queenstown was almost cut off. My trip was off. The lake began to rise and the town began to flood. In my opinion, not quite enough.

Eventually, I managed to leave and head south, and in so doing I actually enjoyed a good day's cycling. The weather was wonderful, the scenery inspiring. The few villages I passed through were peaceful, the people were helpful and friendly, and they had not yet, apparently, discovered pop music. For once my spirits were high. That night I camped beneath twin, dome- shaped hills. At the foot of them had once stood a pub called The Jolly Wagoner, and the hills had come to be known as the Jollies, which reflected my mood.

This feeling of elation was not to last; a few days later about half a dozen spokes broke in the back wheel of my bike, and it began wobbling madly. The problem had been developing for at least a fortnight, and my wheel had become increasingly buckled. I had taken it to several cycle-repairers, but all had failed for the most ironic of reasons. The country has gone metric, it's all litres and kilometres, yet the reason none of the cycle repairers could fix my bike was because all their tools were imperial size and my bike was metric.

Before the bike finally collapsed under me, I managed to cycle as far as Invercargill, at the end of State Highway 6 which I had followed all the way from its beginning at Picton. But I had been hoping to cycle as far as Bluff, a small port some 10 miles south of Invercargill, at the end of a peninsula. This really is New Zealand's Land's End. A little disappointingly, I had to do this final section by minibus. There were only two other passengers, a German and a Japanese lad. The German's name was Herman or, as he said himself, 'Herman the German'.

The minibus passed through the dispiriting little town of Bluff and came to the end of the road. There was nothing there but a tall, multi-armed, yellow signpost pointing out the direction and distances to such places as Sydney, London and Tokyo. We took it in turns to photograph ourselves in front of this impressive signpost and, as we did so, though we had left Invercargill in bright sunshine, it began to pour with rain.

FACTFILE

Getting there: Paul Buttle took his own bike on the plane. He had to deflate the tyres, remove the pedals, turn the handlebars to lie parallel to the frame, and pay a pounds 25 supplement.

Accommodation: NZ has a range of different types of accommodation, many geared to what it calls the 'budget traveller'. Campsites cost pounds 2-pounds 3, and are much better equipped than those in Britain (facilities include kitchens, TV rooms, laundry facilities and sometimes a games room). Many campsites also offer cabins, at about pounds 8, which are little huts sleeping two to four people in bunks or single beds, with a table and (often) an electric kettle.

Motels are good value, pounds 20-pounds 22 for a double room. So are hotels: a good double room can cost only pounds 30.

Further information: New Zealand Travel Information Service, 94 Fulham Palace Road, London W6 9PL (081-748 4455).

(Photographs omitted)