NZ Day 25 - Rangitoto Island

Rangitoto Island photo from the brochures

Our excellent hosts and tour guides Kim and Helen came up with the idea for us to spend the morning on the relatively newly created Rangitoto Island (it emerged from the sea after a volcanic eruption 600 years ago) before heading up to Murawai for the model event today.  Luckily Kim was alert to the fact that it would be a popular day for the ferry to the island, so he headed into the city early to queue for us all so we could get on the boat (it’s a bit dumb, but having a ticket for the 20 minute ferry trip doesn’t actually guarantee you a spot on the ferry). 

It was a beautiful day for a trip on the harbour - there were heaps of sailing boats and great views in all directions.  We disembarked at Rangitota and headed up to the highest point on the island - a 2.4km hike. The path went past barren lava fields and through relatively newly wooded forests as it wound its way up to the volcanic crater where the views were pretty cool.  

On the way up we checked out some Lava Caves and crawled through them, emerging through a shaft some 50 metres away. It was super fun.

We still had to get to the model event for the long races so we had to scoot back down the hill to catch the 12:45 ferry back to the mainland.  It turned out that this walk (of 5 or so kms) was six year old Jack's new record for hiking - which was a pretty good effort as half of it was uphill !  He had no trouble with it at all (nor did Ava, who spent a lot of time walking and nattering with Zali).

Tonight and for the next 3 nights we’re staying in a rented house in Murawai - it has a lovely deck and views out to sea.  After checking out the area which will be similar to where we are running tomorrow we had dinner with Clare, Andy and Paul, then drove around to Harald and Linda's to teach them how to play bananagrams.  As it's a similar game to scrabble it's hard to play it if you aren't English, so we eventually settled on a system whereupon they could use either Norwegian or English words, and each of our racks had to include two Norwegian words.That certainly evened up the competition - we had to stop playing before we got beaten!