Raglan, NZ (pt 2)

Day 4 started out great – we slept in until about 10am, which is completely out of the norm for me, since I’ve been waking up anywhere from 6:30am-7:30am. We had enjoyed an evening hanging out in the courtyard with people from Austria, Germany and the US. One traveller in particular, Patrick from California entertained us with the guitar, with Stuart (mentioned in yesterday’s post) on shaker and Dan with a table flute solo.  We’ve been spending a lot of time hanging out and socializing in the hostel’s courtyard.

Our first order of the day was to finally put up our blog post that we had written the night before – this requires us to walk 30 seconds down the street to the library and access their Wi-fi while sitting outside. There’s no wireless access at our hostel, so this short walk was enough to deter us from constantly being attached to the laptop. This complete cutoff from any communications/email/electronics for the past 3 days has been my first true vacation. I would have to admit that I’m still weening myself off of the email and I constantly call our iPod touch the ‘iPhone’. Of course, when I opened up our joint email this morning, I was greeted by a list of worried emails from my parents about a tsunami warning, due to the 8.8 earthquake in Japan, which were sent 8 hours prior. So, here’s the scoop from Raglan – yes, there was a tsunami warning issued by the New Zealand officials, but in parts of Ahipara as well as the Bay of Plenty region. Further to that, the risks weren’t high enough for evacuation, but merely warnings were given out to avoid doing any water sports. Good thing we did our kayaking yesterday 😉

Today we purposely planned for a pretty relaxing day, since our shoulders were still quite sore from yesterday’s 3 hr. kayak adventure. We had initially wanted to go watch a Pro Surf competition, which was supposed to be held at Manu Bay, but since there weren’t any waves to be found, they moved the competition to a beach 45 minutes away. Dan and I weren’t as motivated to drive 45 mins (as opposed to 10 mins), so we decided to check out the children’s festival (enviro-friendly themed) just on the other side of the footbridge. The town also had their annual raft race in the bay – there were 19 entries, where each team had to be in costume, build their own rafts out of recycled materials, and row it around a 500 metre course. There was one raft that was packed with a dozen kids all from Raglan Elementary, who in a nail-biting finish for 6th, passed another raft that started to sink 10 meters before the finish line.

After the race, we meandered to Vinnie’s to have afternoon smoothies and to do some research about rugby games in Hamilton. The initial plan was to check out of Raglan tomorrow to catch a live rugby match in Hamilton. Alas, there is no game to be had. We’ll have to see if we can catch a live game in Australia, thus leading to our decision to extend our stay here in Raglan by one more day. I’ve already arranged our accomodations in Auckland, checking in on March 14th until we fly out on the 17th.

Tonight we will be going to a sold-out show featuring Katchafire, a New Zealand reggae band, along with Mana Maoli from Hawaii, to be held at a bar nearby, called the Orca.