My kiwi and I had a weekend in Whakatane recently.. The "wh" is pronounced as "fa" in the maori language creating a word that sounds like "Fakatane." Anyway it is about a 3 hour drive from Auckland so we headed down across the sunset. We captured this beauty from the road.
We stayed in a flat right across the beach! This beach had been a hangout of "Moko" the friendly dolphin but he didn't visit while we were there. We did catch sight of his fin in the river mouth when we were crossing a bridge in town. (So did a hundred other people that were causing the traffic we were sitting in.) Most of the the weekend consisted of on and off showers with cloudy, humid days. We took long naps and listened to the ocean from our bed in the flat. It reminded me of Hawaii being so close to the water.
On Monday it was Auckland Anniversary day so everyone we knew had off as well. We went for an early morning surf in the surprisingly warm water. (We ended up watching from the beach as our friends ripped it up.) Then in the afternoon went for some whitewater rafting in Rotorua. We were meant to go on the Big, Bad Kaituna.. but it had rained so much it was apparently too flooded to run. So we settled for Zambezi..
Haha just tricking. We went on another grade 4 one that was not quite as rip roaring as we would have liked it to have been. The last morning I took a picture of the sunrise from the lanai of the flat. Gorgeous. We headed up to Tauranga on the way back. I'll post some pictures up soon of a weekend trip there from the end of last year. All in all it was a fun trip!
