Geography Field Trip - Tairua

Alright, so today Shaina and I got to go to Tairua with the Year 11 geography students. The teachers here are so awesome that they just ask us to go on all these trips with them! I got really lucky because I only had one class today that I was missing, and it was a Year 11 class so the students wouldn't have been doing anything in class anyways since most were with me! If you can remember the map I showed you of the Coromandel Peninsula, Tairua is on the other side of the peninsula through the hills. The drive probably took about 45 minutes, so it wasn't too bad.

Once we got there, we drove up one of the hills to a walkway to take us to Paaku Summit. This summit was nothing like the 1349 steps we had to climb last weekend! It was probably only a ten minute walk up, but the view was absolutely beautiful!

Down in the bottome right, you see some dirt and some grass. This is basically just a drop off, so we had to make sure the students weren't goofing around! The area to stand on was just all rocks and dirt and wasn't that big, so it got pretty crowded with thirty students up there. 

They had this little bench thing up at the top which was cool because it is a map basically showing you where everything is. You can see most things and then just look in the general direction of others.

When we were up on the summit, it was low tide, which I'm sure you could tell. That whole sandy area tends to get filled with water at various times throughout the day. The houses you can see on the right are part of Pauanui (which is a stop we made when driving around on the peninsula last weekend) and you can just see some houses on the left which is Tairua. They are very clost to each other, but you have to drive around the bay to get from one to the other.

The reason the geography came up to the summit was because they were working on a traveling and tourism unit. Their goal was to draw a pictorial map of Pauanui. These maps had to include the mountains, the main road that can be seen going through the city, the grassy areas, the shopping center, and all the residency areas. These kinds of maps show a person the basic outline of the city, so their teacher thought it would help with the whole tourism thing if they were able to draw up a map like this for someone.

The town in the middle of the picture is Pauanui. In my picture, the tree is kind of in the way, and I have walked down on a dirt patch a little bit. All of the students were sitting in the good spots where they had a clear view of Pauanui to draw their map. It was an extremely clever project to have the students do because the view of the city was perfect from the summit. It was neat seeing how into their maps some of the students got.

Once the students were done with their maps, we were heading into town. The students were given two surveys and they had to find tourists and fill out the questions on it. I thought this was another neat activity to help students learn more about tourism. I thought that maybe some of the students would just fill in the answers themselves, but I saw a lot of them actually talking to people which was great! They were wearing their uniforms so they all looked nice! The students also had an outline of a map (with basically just the roads and the water indicated) and they had to draw in the rest of the items such as business, parks, houses, etc. on the map like they had done before.

There was something called the Beach Hop happening in Tairua that weekend, so there were a lot of tourists to be surveyed! Basically, it is just a parade of old/vintage cars. 

One of my personal favorites. It's baby pink!

They travel around the whole peninsula and make stops at the various cities. I think it is a week long process that ends here. From my blog last weekend, I think I mentioned seeing some old cars, so these were some of them! However, the amount of old cars that were here was absolutely INSANE! Apparently people come from all over NZ to come to this little festival.

It was pretty neat seeing all of the cars, especially the one with red, white, and blue flames with the license plate "USA SAM" and a bumper sticker that said "I want YOU to come to Beach Hop". I forgot to look what side of the car the wheel was on, so I don't know if the person brought their car over from the US or if it is someone who either lived in the US previously or just loves the country for some reason! 

It's kind of hard to tell, but this was a HUGE grassy area filled with old cars. Besides this area, cars could also be seen parked on the street everywhere, and there was also a park (where the pink car above was) with a strip going along the beach where they also had parked cars. There were seriously old cars everywhere.

While the students did their work, they were basically set free to go around the downtown area for a couple hours, but they just had to make sure to get their stuff done. Meanwhile, us teachers just got to enjoy a day out and make sure if we saw our students that they were maintaining a good name for the school. We got to sit down at a restaurant and eat some lunch (Shaina and I got a "Slipper Island" wood fired pizza. One of the islands that can be seen from the coast of Tairua is named Slipper Island. It kind of had an Asian taste to it, very sweet and delicious), and then we just got to walk around, shop in the stores along the main street (it seems like all these towns have their one main street with the essential shops and that's it), and then go look at some old cars. We told the students where and when to meet to go back, and they all were there on time! Overall, it was a very enjoyable day out and I am so grateful that all of these teachers have been so willing to take us along with them to get the full NZ experience!