Alan's Winter Holiday Recount
My holiday kicked off by Lake Rotoiti, a lake right next to Lake Rotorua where my bach is (view from house of lake on the left), it's relatively small compared to Lake Rotorua, but there aren't as many other boats around, although there is the vintage boat club nearby.
We spend a lot of our time at our bach, and when we do it's usually in summer and out on the water fishing, skiing, knee boarding and biscuiting. But since it's winter, we spent most of our time indoors, watching movies, playing video games and generally just laying around.
The view of the lake from the reserve that our boat is moored in.
The bushwalk from our house down to the reserve where our tie-up is.
The view from our tie-up
We did do a couple of things though, like we went on a walk to a river that comes off Lake Rotoiti, the river is called the Kaituna, Kai meaning food and tuna meaning eel. This river is about a 5 minute walk from our bach which is great, because it's famous for it's river rafting, whitewater kayaking and sledging (whitewater boogie boarding), it is known to have the worlds largest commercial rafting waterfall. The drop is 7 metres and although it may not look like it, it is the highest grade you can commercially raft on.
The Kaituna waterfall from lookout.
River rafters tackling the waterfall but failing to capsize. What a disapointment.
After watching a couple of rafts go down, we headed to our bach where my mum gave my sister and I our first driving lessons (don't worry it was off-road). Shortly after, we were packing, and getting ready for our 3hour drive home. By this time in the week, it was already Friday, meaning we stayed for 5 days.
The view of lake Rotoiti at sunset from our tie-up but from a different angle.
When we got home, I was like,"What do I do now?" So I bought a model Balsa wood aircraft from a hobby shop in Penrose called Airsail. It was great fun to build. (Pictures shown below as I progressed)
It didn't take as long as expected to get this far although it did kill a lot of time.
On Wednesday Teresa, Cindy C, Harry and I went rock climbing in Panmure at Extreme Edge, which was awesome fun. We climbed all of the hardest walls and the competition between us was really intense. Harry and I stayed much longer than the other two and we had a huge air hockey tournament, and with some awesome skill I won. Combining that with three hours of climbing made two really tired guys.
When Friday came I was tired and not looking forward to going back to school so I bought another balsa wood model. It was much more complex than the previous one and I now I still haven’t finished it. It was a model Runabout boat of the 1940's, it was also much bigger than the aeroplane that I had built previously, and so it should take much longer to build.
Saturday morning was one of the most exciting parts of the whole holiday, because I went to a hockey meet where we trained and played games. There were about 5 coaches and most of them either played for either Auckland mens/womens or NZ. It was great fun because what they didn't realize is they put all of the good players in one team and we won every competition meaning lots of prizes and chocolate. They even gave use free coke. I also got some one-on-one training with a coach that played for the Black Sticks so now I can hit really good deceptive sweep hits.
That afternoon, my mum’s best friend arrived at our house with her parents from Perth in Australia and they told my mum all this stuff about swimming with Whale sharks.
On the last day of school I was really tired and I didn't want to come back to school, but luckily the day did finish on a good note, as we had friends and family over for dinner. That concludes what I did for the winter holiday.
By Alan Watt
