Winiata’s Blog

On the 8th of April, rooms 3 & 7 arrived at school with all their bags packed and ready to depart. We were going to Ohope for this year’s camp. Ohope is a nice little town right next to the beach. Once the bell rang to start school, we all assembled outside the classroom, but we had to wait for another hour because one of the drivers had not yet arrived. Just before we left, the teacher put us into the groups that we were travelling in. I had the best car because our driver gave us chocolate bars to eat. 

On our way to Ohope we took a detour and stopped at Lake Okataina, and boy was it windy! We went onto the lakeshore and immediately noticed two waka that were beached, half on the shore and half in the water. We played touch on the sand and I got hurt. I was running fast and I fell forward and grazed my knee badly. 

After eating lunch we took a walk along a track into the bush. I was misbehaving and tossing sticks onto the track. Eventually the track led to an even windier clearing by the lake. The force of the wind was so strong that when I tossed a stick straight up into the air it landed 5 metres behind me. After a while we returned back to where the cars were parked. 

On the way back we drove through some very winding roads, and our car came very close to scraping against the steep cliffs on the left hand side. After that, the rest of the trip was ordinary, until we arrived in Whakatane and got lost for a while.

When we finally arrived at Ohope we discovered we were the first car to get there. We couldn’t unpack because the cabins were still locked so we played cricket while we waited for everyone else to get there. My friend accidentally hit the ball across the road and we weren’t allowed to cross over to get it so that ball was history until later on in the day when we recovered it from a bush. Once the others got there, we all grabbed our bags and put everything in the cabins. 

Later that afternoon we went to the beach to play a game of touch. My knee was still hurting and I tripped over again and got sand in it so that didn’t help. So I abandoned the touch game and decided that throwing handfuls of wet sand at the girls would be more entertaining. That night we had meatballs and spaghetti for dinner. I stuffed myself full.  Then I went to bed and slept like a log. That’s the first day done.