Tauranga Street Food Festival – Day 320

Today we’re going to be checking the festivals and events in Tauranga.

So we’re still just on the parking lot right. And Laura is already taking pictures. Admittedly, it’s a beautiful owl. It’s actually a morepork, New Zealand native dwarf owl. But she’s already taking pictures. That’s outrageous.

That’s probably some street art that we forgot on our street art crawl the other day so check the cards above to see what that was all about, but anyway we are at the street food festival in Tauranga and we are checking out some of the popular events.

First up there is a bomb contest, yes, you heard that right, bombing is basically jumping into the water and making the biggest splash possible and it’s apparently one of the favourite Kiwi past times. In short, this is giving an award to the fattest kid in the crowd.

After the competition is finished and the trophy is given to the winner we are moving on toward what we are here for, it’s food. There is heaps of food at this food truck or street food festival and there is actually way too much for us to choose from so we are taking the time to stroll around first check out every single one of the booths before we pick what is gonna be our meal.

The Food Truck Festival is taking place in the city centre of Tauranga on The Strand which is this piece of waterfront which is really awesome it’s backed with restaurants there’s walkways, even a few sculptures to check out, we’re super glad that we’re here today to check out the food. There’s about seven different food trucks here at the festival and that’s going from burgers, churros, Mexican Kiwi fusion, more burgers, seafood and crepes.

The atmosphere here is absolutely buzzing. it’s such a cool summer feeling everyone’s happy, the food trucks are bustling and there’s so many amazing smells coming from every single one of them. It is making our decision to choose something to eat absolutely impossible.

We finally decide that we want to have something sweet and we want to have something savoury so we decide head to the crepes food truck where we do have one savoury crepe and one sweet crepe. Delicious.

Bonjour, can we get a banana and chocolate crepe and the bacon, onion and mushroom please?

Laura is playing foodie pretentious here by using the only French word that she knows sadly it’s bonjour and has nothing to do with food but at least she’s polite right? Anyway the people in the food track are doing us an amazing crepe right here they are filling it up with Nutella and bananas and mine is gonna be with bacon, mushrooms and a tonne of onion because you know French food onions has to go together, right?

Because there is so many people around we decide to find ourselves a place a little bit quieter to eat our food and we are heading toward the waterfront we find ourselves a nice flat rock and turns out that we are in prime position to watch the next event of the day which is the dragon boat race.

To be honest, we had no idea what dragon boat racing was when we first sat down to watch this event but it turns out that it is large canoes racing on the water and it’s pretty fun to watch. And apparently there are loads of teams all around New Zealand so this is a pretty popular sport to check out.

It kind of reminds us of the time when we’ve seen waka, which are Maori canoes, being paddled down the various rivers and lakes around New Zealand. One time we saw it in on Waitangi Day in Okains Bay, we’ll link up to the cards above to check that out cos that’s really awesome, and another time we at the Tamaki Maori Village in Rotorua, again we’ll link up to the cards above cos you should definitely check those out.

It’s a tight race but to be honest we don’t know which one wins cos we are too busy stuffing our faces with crepes.

Tauranga has loads of events like this one where you can try the local delicacies at food trucks for instance, there’s the farmers market which happens every single week in Tauranga every Saturday from 8am to 12pm on Fifth Avenue if you want to find it.

Moving on from the festival we are taking a short diversion just a walk away from the food truck festival and stumble upon Josh Pow which is doing a live concert right in the middle of the waterfront of Tauranga, it’s really cool and some of the locals really look like they’re enjoying it. I really like the feel of this whole place and continues as soon as we arrive back at our hostel the Pacific Coast Lodge where it’s an open mic night at the hostel.

Tomorrow we are heading on the water to check out a super pod of dolphins that I don’t know is going to be here, so surprise.