Pooped!!!

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Just a brief entry this evening (for yesterday) as we are all pretty drained, if elated, after our first white-water rafting trip … photos and text to come tomorrow hopefully.
Yesterday started slowly as we waited … and waited … and waited for Diana to get back from her run along the beach. She had tried to run to the end of Waihi Beach, unsuccessfully. Our drive from Waihi Beach to Rotorua took us via the Kiwi Capital of the World, Te Puke … but, more memorably, with a beautiful stop for lunch on the beach at Papamoa. This was the longest beach any of us have ever seen and we seemed to be sharing it with just three surfers! Such was the heat of the sun and the crashing of the waves that W, E and P couldn’t help but throw themselves into the water for the first time of the day. Diana managed to spend a few precious minutes sunbathing before we were back on the road …

Rotorua smells … and we couldn’t work out if it was the sulphur, someone in the back of the car or the sewage treatment plant … We were staying 6km outside town (thankfully the other side of steep hill!) on the shores of Blue Lake. Beautiful clear water and a diving platform had us throwing ourselves in for the second time today. A barbecue including huge and fresh Coromandel green-lipped mussels followed before we got our heads down early before White-Water rafting tomorrow.

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