Well, the tent held up last night. Today, we left Bark Bay fairly early as we had a lot of paddling to do. We continued along the coast for a bit to Tonga Island to check out some more seals. There were a lot more of them on this island compared to the Pinnacle Island colony. We even saw some of the seal pups. The water was a bit choppy out this way, but not too bad. After we checked out the seal colony, we headed straight back to Marahau stopping only once on a little unnamed beach near the Anchorage Bay area. We were gearing up here for the "Mad Mile" again, but it turned out to be very tame compared to the day before. With no problems there, we steadily made our way back taking the coastline along the way. It was another beautiful sunny day.
We were originally scheduled to take the evening ferry back up to the North Island and were going to go up the the Bay of Islands up north of Auckland, but the weather was so nice and we were enjoying ourselves so we decided to stay down south for a bit. Fortunately, I bought fully changeable ferry tickets, so we called them up and postponed it a couple of days. On the advice of one of the staff members of the Ocean River Kayak Company, we decided to drive an hour or so to nearby Golden Bay.
We didn't have any accommodation planned and didn't realize how busy it gets here over the summer time. It's not a ton of people, but since the towns in Golden Bay are pretty small, they fill up quickly. Fortunately, we found another Top 10 Holiday Park at Pohara Beach. This wasn't the best place for camping as it was pretty crowded. They did not have any available cabins and only overflow campsites for the evening so we had to suck it up and pitch the tent on a piece of grass out in the open. It didn't turn out to be too bad.
The things people have at the campsites are ridiculous. Apparently this is a pretty popular place for families to come to every year over the holidays. Most of them come for weeks at a time. I have never seen so many gigantic tents here. People put up big tents practically the size of houses. They have electric hookups and people bring refrigerators, flat screen TVs, and washers and dryers to hook up in their tents. Some of them also had real bunk beds in them. I guess people pack up their whole house in a trailer then pull everything back out at the campsite. I meant to get some pictures but unfortunately forgot. Oh well, the people were pretty interesting. Some of the older ladies came over and talked to Dan and me about my grill that I brought because they thought it was really cool and different than anything they had seen before. They explained that everyone in the campground tries to show each other up each year with new gadgets, bigger tents, etc. so they wanted to know where they could get a grill like mine. They were a bit disappointed when I told them I shipped it over from the U.S. but some of them had family over there so I can just imagine that the campground will be full of grills like mine next year.
After a long day of paddling and driving, we hung out for the evening, made some food, then cooked some make-shift s'mores over a little gas burner that I had. They do not have Grahm Crackers or the right kinds of marshmallows here, but we did OK.
View of Bark Bay from our Kayak as we headed out
Tonga Island fur seals on the rocks.
A little deserted beach near Anchorage where we stopped before the Mad Mile
Coming back to shore in Marahau
The Beast in its element on the way to Golden Bay
Make-shift s'mores at our campsite in Golden Bay
The ocean doesn't look too bad in your photos and the weather always seems beautiful. I guess you guys picked the perfect time for this kind of trip.
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