Whanganui river - Day 5

Both Mikey and I were awoken at 5am to the sound of school children screaming. This did not go well with our whiskey hangovers. The good news was by the time we got up - around 7 30am - the school group was gone and we had the hut to ourselves to make a nice breakfast. On top of that the weather was fantastic. A few clouds here and there, but an all around perfect day.

We made slow time of getting on the river by 10 ish, which wasn't a problem since we needed to hit high tide going into Wanganui for 2:45pm. The scenery from downs hut to Wanganui was the least attractive. As we pulled closer to the city we found more and more signs of populated land. I could only feel sad for the realization that the paddle was coming to an end. This has been the first and only time on Te Araroa that I've had a partner, and this experience on Whanganui has certainly been one of the best. It will be a quick goodbye to Mikey, as I won't be looking anywhere but forward for the next two weeks to Wellington.

It was a total of 42km of paddeling we had today, and we stopped halfway at Hipango park. When we headed up to the campground and found the 2nd group of school kids. We had a brief chat with their instructors and then headed back down to the docks to have lunch. While we were halfway through our meals a few of the kids came to talk to us, and then before we knew it the whole group was down there getting ready to go for a swim. I have never seen Mikey pack up the barrels in the canoe so fast. One of the instructors climbed a thin metal pole and had a pretty epic jump into the water right near our canoe before we set off on our way.

Eventually we made it to Whanganui holiday park and we were both pretty wiped. After setting up our tents we decided we would walk 3km to the nearest dairy to grab some nice tasty snacks. When we got there we decided we would head a little further the the 4 square. Then we saw a dominos pizza car drive by and we decided to follow that. 12km later we made it back to the holiday park after going to 4 different dairies and scarfing down 2 full pizzas.

It was hard to believe that we pulled off 54km of paddleing and walking today. I slept like a baby.