Found and sanded more gelcoat patches<\/li>\n<\/ul>\nAround midday we packed it in, tidied up and had a brief lunch before heading into town to watch the Tai Tokerau Haka Road Show.\u00a0 The show was an opportunity for three of the local (normally competitive) traditional singing\/dancing groups to showcase their work along with a few other entertainers.<\/p>\n
The show was to a packed hall and had a fundraising (for Christchurch) element to it.\u00a0 Curiously they had a Butlins style host who introduced each act.\u00a0 The opener was a great singing chap who the audience knew as a contestant on NZ Idol.\u00a0 Next was the first of the singing\/dancing groups.\u00a0 If we thought we were treated last Friday, it just got better.\u00a0 With about 15 females and 15 males in traditional costume we were given several different performances all strung together seemlessly.\u00a0 The crowd would cheer when certain songs began presumably because they were familiar.\u00a0 All the male led performances for this group and those that followed seemed to be some variation on the haka.<\/p>\n
Next came two sisters, a 14 year old on the cello and a 10 year old who played the violin so well it almost brought tears to the eyes.\u00a0 They played 2 songs to huge applause from the audience.<\/p>\n
Next came the smallest of the three traditional groups about the same size as the group we had last Friday.\u00a0 Between them and the final group was a round of raffle winners.\u00a0 The last traditional group was the same group of performers as we had last Friday but beefed up in numbers.\u00a0 They exceeded their prior performance by a long shot.\u00a0 The larger audience brought out more enthusiasm and with more of them and bigger acoustics their performance sang out.<\/p>\n
And there it could have finished except they decided to bring all three groups together on stage to sing and dance three traditional numbers which they all knew.\u00a0 Fantastic stuff.<\/p>\n
It was no surprise that we ran into cruisers in the hall.\u00a0 We ended up sitting right at the front in front of Brian and JoDon from El Regallo.\u00a0 We bumped into Kathy from Attitude on the way out.<\/p>\n
We didn’t stay too long as we had a little more to do.\u00a0 We drove to Bunnings to pick up a few bits and pieces for the boat.\u00a0 On the way back to the boat we stopped off and had a walk around the wetlands area we’d seen many times and vowed to visit.\u00a0 It was a quite pleasant and very easy walk allowing us to see a number of birds, etc. quite close to town.<\/p>\n