Tsunamis, Surfing, and Angry Hostel House Owners

Over the weekend there was an earthquake registering 8.9 on the richter scale off of the north coast of Japan. An 8.9 earthquake is massive and sends tsunami waves out for thousands of miles around where the quake occurs. Coincidentally, I happened to be spending the weekend on a trip to Raglan, a little beach town on the west coast of the North Island. It turns out a beach is not the place to be in the face of possible tsunamis but hey, what the hell you only live once.

We came to the tiny, super beachy, stereotypically-surfer-townish town of Raglan the day before, and spent the day hanging out on the beach and kayaking. We spent the night in the only available hostel left which was more of a house than a hostel but beggars can't be choosers. We also decided it would be a good idea to tell the owner that there were four of us staying there when we were in fact a group of six. Oops. But lucky us we were very sneaky and managed to go unnoticed with three people in each of the two rooms we payed for. And then it got exciting, as we found out about the earthquake when one of our friends woke us up at 3 am with plans of evacuating Raglan and moving to high land as soon as possible, never mind the 70 dollar surf lessons we had already payed and booked for nor the money we had pre payed for the other night in the hostel. Luckily, we all went back to bed instead of evacuating and woke up early the next day to find that there was a tsunami warning out for all of New Zealand as well as the west coast of the United States- bummer dude.
We went to see if our surf lesson would be on anyway, and when we met up with our instructor Surfer Steve, we were informed that there was a beach ban where we were meant to be going but would play it by ear because the ban was supposed to be lifted soon.
Lucky us, the tsunami warning continued but so did our lessons! Super Surfer Steve deemed it to be safe to surf so we donned our wetsuits and made fools of ourselves on foam beginner surf boards. But we all managed to stand and catch a few waves, and, as our instructor liked to tell us, we surfed a tsunami.

That night we played some cards in the hostel and were in high spirits until the owner of the house came down, realized how many of us there were, and proceeded to rip us a new one about how much we suck. Thats not quite how she worded it but thats more or less what I got out of her speech. So we had to pay a little extra for that nights accommodations.

We spent the next day fooling around on some real boards lent to us by a friend of a friend from the states, and only one of us injured himself with the new and improved hard boards. On our way home we stopped by Bridal Veil Falls, New Zealand's highest waterfall. We resisted the urge to try to jump from it into the pool below but got some great pictures of the place.

The drive home was super fun with six of us crammed into a Toyota Camry but 2 hours later we were back to home sweet Huia.