Whitianga Scallop Festival

Julia and I took a trip up to Coromandel for the weekend to stay with the geezer and the mum-in-law and then over to Whitianga for the annual scallop festival.
As you can imagine there were all kinds of scallop related happenings and food items (scallop sausages, who would have thougt) and a merry old time was had by all. It's always interesting seeing what access to vast quantities of alcohol at 10am in the morning does to a crowd of around 6000. We decided to leave before the 'fun' really started but by about 1pm we had seen everything and tasted most of the food that we really wanted to (the scallop sausages were fantastic). It's a great event and we would return though the venue was too small for the crowd numbers and the marquees to close together. By midday it was getting more than a little claustrophobic.
One of the highlights was definately the scallop band. The music was awful but the enthusiasm and the stamina of the band members was amazing (the temperature in their costumes would have been pretty hard to handle). Here is a short video of them in all their scallopy glory.

Scallop Band

This is a New Zealand 'delicay' Kina (maori) or sea urchins, personally I can't stand the stuff but some people swear by it. The parts that are eaten are the creamy brown bits running down the sides of the shell. Seriously if our alien overlord creators had meant us to eat the stuff would they have made it look like that? I think not.





And now a lot of very cool cars











First person to get all the car makes and models wins a life time supply of Kina.

Eventually I managed to tear Julia away from the cars and it was off back to Coromandel for a spa and a well deserved Carlsberg mmmmm those Danes make a good brew.