Day 2: Pohara

We were staying 2 nights in Pohara, which I thought was the closest campsite to our kayaks. Turned out not to be true, but it was close enough. We spent the day lounging on the beach, swimming, lounging in the shade....  The only thing that we had to do was make it to our kayak safety briefing later that afternoon. It was fantastic.

We were staying at a very commercial campsite, but we were fortunate to have it mostly to ourselves for our time there. Right before we left for our safety briefing, we did notice things starting to pick up. When we got back from our briefing, we thought the place was packed. I ended driving back by here a week later though, and we were mistaken. A week later it was unbelievably crowded! So much for a relaxing holiday at the beach...

It is a very Kiwi thing to pack up everything, including the kitchen sink, and head to the beach. The fortresses that people had set up put our 2-man backpacking tent to shame. Pro our tent though, we can set it up in about 5 minutes. We watched teams of people spend hours assembling theirs. Directly across from us at the campsite we even saw two, full-size refrigerators being delivered to a tent! Bigger refrigerators than we have in our apartment. It seems crazy that we had to pay $2 for a coin-op shower, but we could've hooked up our refrigerator for free...

 

 

We needed to get an early start on day 3, the first kayaking day, so we had our safety briefing late that afternoon. It was a very thorough briefing that took about 3 hours including an on the water demonstration that we could tip our boat and get back in. No dramas except that by the time we got to the boat demo, the sun had started to go down, which made for a cold dunk. And somehow I managed to beat myself up on the boat so that I was sporting some pretty awesome bruises the entire week.