Day four

Well we headed out to Hot Water Beach last night only to find the tide too high, it was also dark by 7pm. We decided to make dinner in the campervan and wait for the tide to go out further before digging our hot water pit. We waited just over an hour and the tide was still too far in so we decided to try again in the morning as the tide was set to be out at 9:10AM. This morning we had more success! They suggest having a shovel and for good reason. We only had our little dust pan and bucket from the camper and when we got out there we realized we had some serious digging ahead of us. There was a group of about 8 people who already had their pool almost complete so Blane and I and a couple from London started in with our plastic tools. The tough part is the waves are still coming in and washing out your hard work until you can build a wall high enough to keep the water out. We had our pool complete until a girl in the other pool broke their wall and all the water washed out into ours and broke our walls. We gave up and jumped into our neighbor's pool, what we should have done in the first place. It was such a fun experience and the water was really hot! After our beach bath we were back on the road down the coast to Tauranga. On the penninsula farming was mostly livestock and as we moved closer to the Bay of Plenty it turned to orchards and kiwi groves, they look really similar to grape vineyards. We rolled into town early afternoon and got ourselves another beachside campsite in the shadow of Mt. Maunganui. The beaches on the east side of the pennisula are all white sandy beaches and great for surfing. We grabbed fish and chips for dinner, to our suprise our meal for 2 could have fed a party of 10, and are headed to see a movie tonight. Tomorrow we're going running up the mount and then headed to the Kiwifruit capitol of the world, Te Puke. We'll end up in Rotorua for the next night or two - Maori country.