Detours

Summer, 1981. A youngish Neville Peat set out from Cape Reinga on his imported 10-speed bike ‘Blue’, aiming to cycle through small-town New Zealand from north to south, all the way to Stewart Island. The week before Easter, he reached his destination. He wrote a book about it, Detours: A journey through small-town New Zealand, which sold lots of copies and was broadcast on radio.

Many times in the intervening years, usually on anniversaries of the journey – ten years, fifteen years, twenty years – he wished to try a repeat journey, but life held other challenges. Now, as a leading author and in the age of the personal computer and cell phone, a very different world, he has revisited many of the towns and regions, not on a bicycle, but by car. In Detours – A generation on, he reflects once again on how small-town New Zealand is doing.