A Day Out Of The Office

 I had a rather pleasant "work" day today, as I had to drive down to the Bay of Plenty port city of Tauranga to meet with a customer. This is just an excuse to post a few gratuitous pics of my trip!

I took the dark blue route above

The first 90 minutes or so of my trip were in very dense fog

By the time I thought to take a couple of pictures, it had thinned out a bit

After crossing the Kaimai Range onto the coastal side, the fog cleared

Having seen numerous twin trailer logging trucks on the road, heading for the port, it was nice to see this example of a more efficient way of moving bulk freight around....

..... on my trip over the Kaimai's, I spotted a brown tourist sign pointing to McLaren Falls, so, on the return trip, I took a slight (3km) detour to check it out!

On the Wairoa river near Tauranga, Manawa Energy runs the Kaimai Hydroelectric Power Scheme. This includes a superb recreational area, popular for kayaking, rafting, fishing, running and picnicking. To provide great white water for recreational kayakers and rafters, we regularly release water from McLaren Falls dam during warm months.

The Falls themselves, as viewed from the footbridge on the right above

If you look closely, you may spot some people, to give scale to the size of the rocks - quite impressive

You might think the below sign was unnecessary.....!

On the return trip, all the earlier fog was long gone. The image below is approximately the same point in the journey as the first three images above.

My last stop on the way home was at lake Karapiro.

Lake Karapiro (Māori: Karāpiro) is an artificial reservoir lake on the Waikato River at Karapiro, 8 kilometres (5.0 mi) south-east of Cambridge in New Zealand's North Island. The lake was formed in 1947 by the damming of the Waikato River to store water for the 96-megawatt Karapiro power station The lake is also one of two premier rowing venues in New Zealand (alongside Lake Ruataniwha in Canterbury) and is the base for the country's high-performance rowing programme.

The lake, regarded as one of New Zealand's best rowing venues, hosted the World Rowing Championships in 1978 and 2010, as well as the rowing events for the 1950 British Empire Games. The national rowing championships, then called the Dominion championships, were first held on the lake in 1949. Since the 1980s, Lake Karapiro alternates with the South Island's Lake Ruataniwha in hosting the New Zealand national rowing championships and the New Zealand secondary school rowing championships (Maadi Cup). Rowers who train on the lake mostly live in nearby Cambridge.

An International Rowing Federation inspection panel visited Lake Karapiro in March 2006 and said in its report that it was one of the fairest courses in the world they had seen and that the lake was one of the most picturesque in the world.

A very tenuous "wargaming" link comes via the name of the Maadi Cup mentioned above!

During World War II, members of the 2nd NZEF based at Maadi Camp in Egypt competed in regattas on the Nile against local Egyptian rowing clubs. At a regatta held on 20 November 1943 the Maadi Camp Rowing Club "Kiwi" oarsmen beat the Cairo River Club by 11 points to six to win the Freyberg Cup, which they then gifted to the competitors. In return, as a token of friendship, Youssef Baghat presented the Kiwis with a cup. Youssef Baghat's cup was offered to the NZARA (now NZRA) as a trophy for an annual boys' eight-oared race between secondary schools and was brought to New Zealand at the end of the war.

Renamed the Maadi Cup it was first raced for in 1947 at Wanganui where it was won by Mount Albert Grammar School, who beat Sacred Heart College by a half-length. 

Members for the 2nd NZEF competed in rowing regattas and won races run by the Cairo River Club until they were shipped back to New Zealand at the end of the War.