Near Wanganui I spent a day and a night on a remote hillside with a gang of sheep shearers. Now these men really did seem tough. They say that shearing 300 sheep burns as much energy as running a marathon, but nobody runs a marathon every day. These men, however, were shearing 450 lambs day in, day out.

For just a couple of hours I thought I might at last have found a tiny clique of that dwindling species I was searching for. But these men were transfixed on their work. Paid by the fleece, they scarcely had time to pause between releasing one animal and grabbing the next.

Embarrassed as I am to admit it, I think the only way I could have got their attention would have been to wear a sheepskin coat. Even then, I suspect, I would have been derobed only of my outer garment and dispatched into the adjoining field with a friendly pat on the rump.

But I wasn’t giving up just yet. I still had many miles to ride.

From Wanganui I rode down the Kapiti coast to Wellington, then I crossed the Cook Strait over to the south. Along the west coast, the waves of the Tasman Sea crashed onto driftwood-strewn beaches to my right while the hills of the Southern Alps soared, snowcapped, to my left. It was summer. The rata trees bloomed scarlet and the rivers glowed turquoise, infused with glacial silt.

At Franz Josef I stopped for the night and went kayaking on Lake Mapourika with a man named Wayne, who owned a company called Ferg’s Kayaks. It was an idyllic evening. The sense of stillness was mesmerising. As the sun set, the sky turned a dusky pink; before it loomed snow-capped mountains and the infinitely slowly moving ice of the Franz Josef glacier.

“So,” I said to Wayne as we paddled back towards the shore, “why did you call your company Ferg’s?” It transpired that Ferg was his pet duckling, named after the New Zealand kayaking champion, Ian Ferguson. And it soon became apparent there was room for only one bird in his life.

I continued down the west coast, then dropped down from the tightly winding roads of Haast Pass and arrived at the sweeping bends that hugged the shores of two glimmering lakes, Wanaka and Hawea. Then from Queenstown I took the road alongside Lake Wakatipu out to Glenorchy, where the views were so sensational they were a hazard.

Still, I was starting to love riding that bike. The men may not have been making the mark but the bike was turning out to be the perfect partner. I was now on intimate terms with the throttle, and the sense of speed, the rush of wind and the movement around the bends were wildly exciting. The smells, the temperature changes, the contact with the elements — sun, rain, wind and even, on one unfortunate occasion, hail — meant so much more to me as a biker than they would have from the closeted safety of a car.

By the time I reached the far south I had built a relationship with the bike that was more rapturous by far than any of my encounters with the men. I had travelled more than 3,000 miles from the far north of the country to Invercargill on the southern tip. I had ridden mountain passes and flat coastal highways. I had been transformed from timorous novice to impassioned biker.

On my final evening there wasn’t another soul on the road. The descending sun cast long shadows across the golden grasses. Hawks skirted and dived through the hills. I turned the throttle a little more and then nudged it further still. Together, the bike and I roared into the sunset.

Polly Evans is the author of Kiwis Might Fly, published by Bantam