From the barbeque area and parking along the top of the ridge beside Kai Iwi beach, you can look down on the beach itself and one of the smaller rivers that flow into the sea from further inland. After some initial concern about how to get the quad bikes down onto the beach, we discovered this fairly new bridge over the little river and having taken a fairly roundabout route, were able to access the beach via the bridge. It is a very tight squeeze but the quads made it by millimetres. From the end of the bridge we took a right turn - and barring being trapped by an incoming tide, one can ride for miles and miles.
This is the terrain beside the beach - here you can see another one of the small rivers which empty out into the ocean along Kai Iwi beach.
Hennie and Marieta have two quad bikes and a scrambler and invited us to join them for the afternoon. Our bikes are somewhat inappropriate for this kind of adventure so we were most appreciative that Hennie hauled out his scrambler for the afternoon, freeing up a quad bike for us to share. It was quite a different experience to be flying along the beach without a helmet on and hanging on for dear life behind a sworn enemy of all things quad bike! We absolutely stand by our contention that quad bikes have to be banned from motor bike rallys, but for a 'jol' on a deserted beach on a late summer Sunday afternoon - they do the job very nicely thank you!
We found that for the most part, the beach is completely deserted and you can stroll or ride or whatever you feel like for miles and miles without coming across another soul. It was a particularly lovely day and although the wind got up a bit later in the afternoon, the weather was good enough for us to decide to host a 'farewell to summer' barbeque at the same beach the next weekend! Like all good things, we knew the lovely weather would be coming to an end and wintery, cold and blustery days would soon be replacing the idyllic days we have enjoyed for the past couple of months.
There were a couple of scrambler bikes in the group and the yellow one featured here, has just emerged from a complete dunking in the ocean after the driver failed to anticipate the possibility of the water hiding huge holes into which a bike can easily fall! Needless to say, the bike needed quite a bit of coaxing before the engine would fire up but to our amazement, it wasn't too long before the rider was buzzing along in his very wet, new boots! We happened to witness the dunking of rider and bike and admit that although we were slightly concerned, the disappearance of the rider, and I really mean total disappearance, was actually hysterically funny! This yellow scrambler is not Hennie's one - it was Ruan who took the dunking on his almost brand new out of the box yellow 'submarine'!
Kai Iwi beach is about 15 km out of Wangaui and is where we first thought about renting a house - in fact, if you squint at this photograph, you should just be able to make out a few houses perched on the top of the 'mountains' in the distance. The one we very nearly took was 'second from the front'! In retrospect, it was the best decision to live in town and we were right in assuming that folks aren't too eager to travel the 15km for a music lesson each week.
All in all, a marvellous relaxing afternoon.
Dis al!
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