Climbing at Paynes Ford

Hoorah! I'm back on par! And with the fantastic excuse to eat and drink as much as possible to build myself back up! Time to get back on the rock and start being awesome again! 

We went straight out to the climbing area of Paynes Ford today. It's not the biggest cliff in the world, (surprisingly small actually) but the rock was a decent quality at least and it was nice a shady. Clare was 'rope-gun' for the day putting up most of the routes as I was (semi) taking it easy. (Very sensible I hear you say). We'd had to clean our ropes before leaving the North Island as the ground below the crags are so dusty, they'd become filthy. This time we were prepared with a classic kiwi 'rope tarp' to keep things clean.

It was a quick walk to the crag, through more 'jungle forest', which gave the cliffs plenty of shade and kept them nice and cool. The climbs were fun, but it's a shame they aren't four times as long!

As this was day one 'back on the rock' after my enforced 'time-out' we decided to just do a few routes then come back to the house for lunch. It was a fine plan in theory, but we ended up doing our usual over excited thing and ended up staying until nearly four o'clock. By then the sun was well on the crag making it too hot to climb - our arms were too tired and I was starving anyway!

A coffee and cake break (after a monster scrambled egg on toast session) perked us back up enough to get down to the beach for a swim. The tide had just come in and the water felt positively warm. Maybe the hot sand heated it up? It really was nice though! 

Then, to celebrate my return to the land of the living, we went to the 'Dangerous Kitchen' Cafe in town, and got ourselves some lovely big pizzas! Just what the doctor ordered! Sort of.