City of Ales

Some of you will remember that back in London, a highlight of our summer was our annual visit to the CAMRA Great British Beer Festival in Earl's Court. Living in NZ has meant that we are now missing the festival two years running. There was a beer shaped empty space in our lives which needed filling.

Not to worry - the longer we spend in NZ the more we are realising that the craft beer scene over here is on the up, to the extent that they have beer festivals here too! A bit of googling later and we landed on City of Ales as the festival of choice.

What would the wrong reasons be?

Having spent an enjoyable evening with my British colleague Hannah and her husband Jody a few weeks before (made very enjoyable by our realisation that in Hannah and Jody we had definitely found beer drinking kindred spirits) we invited them along. Pen and paper ready for tasting notes, food and beers chilling back in the flat for all of us afterwards and we were sorted for a fantastic Saturday. A great time was had by all - thanks to Hannah and Jody for agreeing to feature in the blog - roll on the next beery afternoon spent together!

First drink, already merry!

Yummy lunch included in the entry

Little ladies getting served

Matt's ingenious way of freeing up both hands
for making the all important tasting notes

Couldn't not do a Nick VM special shot!

Tearing up Whakarewarewa!

Well its been a little while since we blogged. OK a long while. Sorry everyone! It turns out that routine creeps in even when you are in the most beautiful country in the world and we seem to have been focusing rather too much on work and a little bit of beer drinking with friends, and our tiki touring has fallen by the way side. You'll be pleased to hear though that whilst it is June out here (read December for season if you're used to the Northern hemisphere) we have been fitting in some weekend fun, including an absolutely fantastic four day weekend (coinciding with the Queen's official birthday bank holiday) down in Rotorua and the forest park of Whakarewarewa!

Our lovely campsite for the weekend

We have been before (one of our first NZ blogs) but this time was completely different. For a start we had Carrie, which meant we could stay in a beautiful campsite a few kilometres from town, beside a stream which runs through to Lake Rotorua. Soon after arriving we jumped in the deserted campsite's kayaks and enjoyed the sunshine down to the lake.

Sunshiney kayaking

It soon became obvious that this would be an outdoors weekend like no other when Matt discovered that he could hire a fly fishing rod from the campsite owner for a mere $5 for our entire stay. I say an outdoors weekend like no other because despite being in what may be the country with the most recreational fishers in the world, we haven't yet tried it.

You'll all be shocked to discover that we didn't catch anything. To be honest its a miracle that we actually got the line in the river (thanks go to the little boy also staying at the campsite who had a bit more experience than us and showed Matt the ropes). Fun and strangely satisfying (I'm not sure what we would have done with a fish if we had caught one to be honest!)

Matt trying his luck

I took a more energetic approach!

After a relaxing afternoon we awoke the next morning raring to go for two days of mountain biking in Whakarewarewa Forest. Mountain biking was the main purpose of the trip (even though I have never mountain biked previously) and we were both pretty excited (Matt because he was looking forward to the excitement, me because I didn't know what I was letting myself in for). We hired our bikes and got set up in a slightly revised version of our road biking kit (read exactly the same but with proper shorts on over our cycling shorts and no clipped shoes).

Radical

Soon enough we were off into the forest's 100km of trails, ranging from beginner to 'extreme'. I turned down Matt's offer of giving the kid's trail a go and instead got straight onto a steep, narrow and pretty scary trail. Oh dear - we had just booked the bikes for two days and this was pretty intense. All was well though once Matt stopped racing ahead and explained the subtleties of handling the bike (some slight differences from my road bike)... I soon got into it and we spent all day exploring the trails.

It doesn't look scary...

... and OK this trail wasn't really!

This was actually scary -
the photo does not this justice - honestly!

Matt doing his thing

A quick lunch in the van

Back out on the main track to the trails

Trying to catch an air shot,
massive fail from the photographer....

Back to the campsite for a few beers, dinner, some table tennis and telly and we were refreshed ready for our second day.

Free rubbishy magazines to read - yes please,
must catch up with my Aussie/Kiwi gossip...

Of course we had overdone it a bit the day before so I was pretty pooped - we separated for most of the morning so whilst Matt went off to explore the grade 4s and 5s I stuck with the 3s. We both loved it though and definitely got a taste of the other side when it comes to cycling!

The highlight of the day was getting off the bikes, and into the Polynesian hot pools. Rotorua has definitely got it just right having arguably the best mountain bike trails in NZ just a few kilometres down the road from arguably the best spas. We soaked for ages - the muscles loved it and we enjoyed people watching and admiring the sunset. A rather large dinner later (I think the kitchen assumed that whoever ordered the steak sandwich was a bloke and needed extra chips!) and we were ready for bed.

Excited by the size of my dinner

Disappinted by my ability
to eat even half of the dinner.

Luckily the rain only joined us for our last morning so we had a fantastic few hours exploring the Rotorua Museum in the old bath-houses before lunch and heading home. A fantastic weekend - great to get away from work and remind ourselves why we came here in the first place!