Epic 5-day canoe trip down the Whanganui River
Traveling companions: Sue and Jamie, their two boys (Cory and Calum), and a friend named Jack.
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| Whew! Sue and Jamie are fast paddlers |
Traveling companions from our family were Mike, our 3 boys, and Mercy.
(Sage and Joy stayed home with Hannah.)
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| just missing Oak |
Mike sterned my canoe and proved especially good at getting us dumped in the rapids, on the first day in particular.
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| He learned quickly |
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| Stopping to explore a cave - not the mud cave yet |
We paddled 145 kilometers total, which is a lot of paddling, but somehow the boys and Mercy still seemed to spend half their time poppin' manu's...
or jumping off high places in one way or another.
There are 16 different definitions of "manu" in Wikipedia, but none of them is the definition used by teenage boys (and Mercy) in New Zealand.
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| planning the manu |
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| on the way to... |
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| a mean splash |
A good manu has a certain ker-BOOM sound and a very high splash. Supposedly, one must break the water with one's heel, then quickly lay back quickly on the water to create a kind of vacuum.
The manu is the gourmet version of the water bomb and takes practice.
After all that paddling, I came home feeling like this-
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| wish I looked like this, too |
Oak said, "I feel like my shoulders grew two sizes this week!"
Book of the Week: "The Great Divorce" by C.S. Lewis
Our neighbours told us that they almost got a divorce going over the first rapids on the Whanganui, but that doesn't have anything to do with this book. It's about the divorce between heaven and hell, joy and misery.
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| My copy was published in 1946 |
Here's a picture of the newest edition, with its unfortunate cover art-
I re-read this book every year over Christmas holidays. It's my all-time favorite book, hands down, despite the unfortunate cover.
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