Hangi and Lake Rotorangi

This post is dedicated to Steve--- a great friend, doctor, dining buddy, and travelling partner.  We spent about 10 weeks working at the office working together.  He was a great colleague and role model.  His locums term ended this past weekend, so we spent Saturday packing in all sorts of last-minute Kiwiana fun.

Our local paper notified us of a "Pet Day" at the Manaia Primary School.  Manaia is a town of approximately 925 located just northwest of Hawera, a short drive along the Surf Highway. 

Manaia is the "Bread Capital" of New Zealand.   This is because the Yarrows Bakery is located there, and it supplies the bread (dough, frozen) to all the Subway restaurants in New Zealand, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and Taiwan!  That's a lot of bread!!

So, back to Pet Day.  Steve and I arrived to the town early, and thought we'd get a cup of coffee at the local dairy (aka convenience store).   Wrong.   Just so you know, there is nowhere in the town of Manaia where one can get a hot cup of coffee on a Saturday morning.  Fail.

So to kill some more time, we drove to the beach, to catch a glimpse of the morning Tasman Sea.

Then it was finally time for the Pet Competition!!!   Cows were up first.  When the kid/animal's number was called, the kid paraded his animal around for the judge lady.  Sometimes the pet didn't cooperate with the parading, and the judge lady had to give the animal a kind tap on the bum, as seen below.  :)

 LOVE THIS PIC!  I don't know who's cuter, kid or calf!

Here are some of the girls and their calves in the ribbon ceremony.   So precious!

 Inside the school, some of the classes art projects were on display.  Ah, the joys of rural farmland art class....

After Pet Day, we stopped at another dairy in Stratford (this one did have coffee!), but we opted for some soft ice cream (my first since being here in NZ!).  Love the sign :)

Our next stop was a looong drive to Lake Rotorangi, New Zealand's largest manmade lake.  The lake, and the drive there were absolutely spectacular.  We were the only people there!   The day was perfect.

The lake has a short loop path along one side of it.  We were all set to get some exercise (and burn off our Frosty Boy), when the path to the right looked like this:

And then we headed the other way, and after walking only 5 minutes, the other direction looked like this:

 Some serious storm and mudslide trail damage left us hopeless in finding our way around the path.  Sadness.  Next time we'll bring our machetes and do some serious bush-whacking!

Some cool fossils on the beach rocks:

And my favorite picture of the day:

Just gorgeous!

Our ride back home was fairly comical--- we had some traffic jams--- of the sheep and cow varieties.

Sheeps in the fields (all those little white dots!)....

 Sheeps in the roads.....

 This is the cow crossing they warn you about!  (and they sure like to take their sweet-ass time)..



We ended the day with picking up our dinner from another School festival in Normanby (another town just north of Hawera, population 800).   They were hosting a hangi dinner.  Hangi is a traditional Maori form of cooking.  It means "earth oven".  Basically, a meal of meats (ham, lamb, beef, chicken) and veggies (potato, kumara (sweet potato), etc) and stuffing are covered with leaves (cabbage, banana, etc) and placed in the ground into a dug-out pit oven which is heated with stones.  The food cooks all day, and turns out to be a delicious roast meal by 5pm!

The picture doesn't do it justice, but the smells, textures and tastes were delicious!   My only comparison would be US Chicken Barbecue meets Southern Soul food.  YUM!

So, after our hangi, I dropped Steve off at his hotel to make his final preparations for his deparature back State-Side.
Thanks for a wonderful weekend and wonderful 2.5 months, Steve!   I will miss you!

(Steve and I, celebrating his 70th(!) birthday last month)