A 51-year-old Balclutha man may have been the first person to die on New Zealand roads in 2009, after a single-car crash near the Cannibal Bay coastal settlement.
A Kingston man in his late 40s was found dead yesterday morning near his motorcycle beside a bend on the Kingston to Queenstown highway (State Highway 6), just south of the Devils Staircase.
The man had been reported missing on Wednesday evening, police said.
Police could not confirm yesterday when the Cannibal Bay crash happened because they had received different accounts of when the man left the seaside haven.
The man's name had not been released last night because not all his next of kin had been told of his death.
A passing couple spotted the man's four-wheel-drive 50m down a steep incline off Cannibal Bay Rd on a narrow, winding gravel road, about 4km from the site of a minivan crash on Tuesday.
It was the third crash on the road in the past 10 days.
The dead man, the sole occupant of the four-wheel-drive vehicle, was thought to have known the road well.
Sergeant Martin Bull, of Balclutha, said it was too early to say if speed and or alcohol were factors in the crash.
The man had visited friends at cribs at nearby Cannibal Bay on New Year's Eve but accounts from those people placed him in the area at different times.
Sgt Bull said the man's vehicle failed to negotiate a moderate right-hand bend, went off the road and down the incline.
It had rolled "a number of times" before coming to rest about 50m from the road.
Constable Kevin Woods, of Queenstown, said police found the motorcyclist's body next to his bike, just off the shoulder of the road, on State Highway 6 at 7.30am yesterday.
"We saw the bike off the road and found the body close by," Const Woods said.
The 48-year-old Kingston man, whose name had not been released last night, appeared to have had been travelling north and failed to take the right-hand bend "for whatever reason".
"Our understanding is he set off for Queenstown," Const Woods said.
Balclutha and Queenstown police appealed to motorists to come forward if they had any information or had seen anything relevant to the accidents.
In other accidents around the country yesterday, a 33-year-old Levin man was hit by a northbound car in the town centre while walking along the middle of State Highway 57 about 1.30am, and about 10.15am, a Swedish police inspector, 50-year-old Goran Oskarsson, was killed when the campervan in which he and his family were travelling crashed near the central North Island settlement of National Park.
The accidents brought to four the deaths this year, and the Christmas-New Year road toll last night stood at 15, with three and a-half days of the period remaining.
There were 18 deaths and 414 injuries for the 2007-08 holiday period.
The road toll for 2008 was provisionally 359, the lowest in 49 years, but may change when the timing of the Cannibal Bay fatality is confirmed.
The 2007 road toll was 421, and the 2006 toll was 393, according to the Ministry of Transport.
