Climbing Every Mountain The Couple Biking The World!

Breast Cancer Survivor Diana Likes To Push Herself.

- Julie Jacobson

Hippos, gun-toting police, long drops, wild dogs… New Plymouth woman Diana Wynyard reels off her holiday highlights.

Hers is definitely a life less ordinary and one the 69-year-old isn’t about to give up any time soon. In fact, the former cancer patient, along with husband Rhys Masters (63), is in the process of planning the next holiday, through the Himalayas. By bike.

It’s a far cry from 40 years ago, when biking in Nelson, they inadvertently wound up in a nudist camp and accidentally “joined the natives”, as you do.

The couple, whose two sons Eddie and Wyn are professional mountain bikers, have been travelling on two wheels in some of the world’s most inhospitable terrain since 2011, when Diana spotted cheap flights to Rio de Janeiro and suggested it might be fun to ride a recently opened cycleway in Buenos Aries – all 100km of it.

They’d initially planned to cycle the ‘Death Road’ in Bolivia – where Auckland man Emile Vollenhoven was tragically killed in January after his bike went off the edge – but the fares were too expensive.

The Buenos Aries trip was reasonably benign – “just enough to give us a taste for it” – except for the last day when their bikes were stolen and their taxi broke down three times on the way to the airport.