Wednesday, May 06, 2009

Kawhia hot water with Dr Timberlake

Had a lovely day with Dr Timberlake over at Kawhia, the -other- Hot Water Beach in this beautiful country, except its a lot quieter and more wild than the Coromandel beach.















Kawhia (the wh sounds like an F, by the way) is about 50k south of Hamilton. Had a nice steamy cafe and date scone on the way, mmm... I don't do carbos though. Justin had a bacon butty, and him a doctor too! I don't know what this feeding info is here but somehow it should add to your imagination of the day, no?





Kawhia

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Stuck in the rut...



Mmm lovely and warm.. and our sea defences lasted, oh, all of about 10 minutes! woohoo!

you should see the other pose, not so graceful and superheroe, really. oops.

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Cambridge to Hamilton in the kayak woohoo

One stunning waikato morning, a few days ago...

Justin and me at the starting flag. We set off around 7:30am and had a beautiful clear day for the trip, although that meant it was quite chilly too, woohoo!

Our beautiful driving lady for the day was Sally, a world renowned sniffer of horses.


Passing underneath the Cambridge river-crossing bridge. The Waikato was steaming nicely for the first couple of hours and was kind of warm and much clearer than we expected.




Sun makes it way into the river creek to warming us up, mmmm.








Just passed a little waterfall... and Justin takes off! The water looks calm, doesn't it, but it was fast moving with lots of eddies and currents appearing from nowhere... which can be a little alarming :)


This was the route, following the river from Cambridge to the centre of Hamilton, I think thats about 30km by river.



We stopped about 11am for a warmup in the sun, cafe and some lovely buns, or was it a muffin?






And there were loads of ducks, everywhere, very cute.


The duck-shooting season has just started here and I'm starting to think these quacks are pretty smart because all along the river there were loads of mallards and Cambridge lake, it's like there's some stadium concert for ducks, you can hardly see the water for their numbers. I also saw lots of big old brown trout (Tom, is that that likely species?) anywhere the river ran shallow and weedy reedy :)
We got to Hamilton about 12:30 and it all ended too soon, I really like this kayaking malarky.