Saturday morning, we had planned to travel up to the Coromandel Peninsula, east of Auckland on the coast with Jenna, meeting a bunch of her friends when we got there. On the way we passed the town of Paeroa which is the birthplace of the L&P (Lemon and Paeroa) fizzy drink. Consequently, they have a massive L&P bottle statue in the town. We obviously needed a picture with it.

We continued up to Coromandel and checked into our cute little hostel in Hahei which is pretty much the tiniest town imaginable. They had a caf�, restaurant and convenience store, that was all. We changed quickly into bathing suits and drove over to hot water beach to meet Jenna’s friends. Hot water beach is situated over heaps of geothermal activity making the ground and water underneath the sand very hot, even in winter. The basic premise is that you dig a huge hole at low tide and the ground water seeps up and fills your hole creating a spa which you can relax in as the sun sets.

The crew in our spa ^

Digging the hole was pretty easy, the hard part was finding a spot that wasn’t too hot and wasn’t too cold. Then once you’d found a spot you would move an inch to your right or dig your toes in and all of a sudden, scalding hot water is burning you. When people got up out of the pool, their legs were red and basically cooked! Some little kids got over excited and started splashing through abandoned pools only to start crying when they got stuck in near boiling water. That night we watched the Waikato chiefs lose spectacularly before getting an early night for our 7am start the next morning.

The next day dawned bright and clear which meant it was the perfect day to take the walk down to cathedral cove. A few movies have been filmed there, the most well known being The Chronicles of Narnia. It was about a 30 minute walk down to the cove with beautiful views out across the pacific. We braved an extremely muddy path down to Stingray Bay and took in the sun on the rocks for a while before continuing on to Cathedral Cove. It was even more beautiful in real life than in the movies.

White sand beaches with an amazing arch made of white rock. They had fenced the arch off and you weren’t supposed to walk under it to the beach on the other side. We figured we’d be safe if we ran through though, because running way different that walking! We swam out to a huge flat rock about 100 metres off shore and spent quite a while jumping off it.

Haley and I on the rock ^

There was a cool underwater archway that you could walk on next to the rock.

After sunbathing for a while, we decided it wasn’t really summer anymore and we were all really cold so we headed over to Whitianga, a beach town but bigger than Hahei. Jenna’s friends had switched to a hostel in Whitianga and they let you borrow kayaks for free so we grabbed a couple and headed out onto the water to paddle. The rest of the evening was spent playing Frisbee and collecting shells on the beach before Jenna Haley and I decided to grab a dinner of Fish and Chips and head to the ferry which would take us 20 metres across the harbor to where we parked our car. We were waiting in line for our dinner when Jenna reminded us that the ferry took a dinner break from 6:30pm to 7:30pm. Of course it was 6:25pm. Just enough time for us to make it if we ran but not enough time to get our food and make it. Jenna and Haley ran on ahead to try and get the ferry to wait while I waited for the food to be ready. As soon as it was, I sprinted as fast as I could, with only a towel wrapped around my bathing suit to the ferry dock only to find out that the although Jenna and Haley had arrived on time, the ferry guy had refused to take even them. So we ended up having to sit in our towels on the dock and eat, all the while looking at our car across the harbour that was sooo close to us.

Finally we managed to make it back across the habour to our car and once we had showered and changed, we headed back to Jenna’s friends hostel to work on our project for Women in Management and hang out. We managed to hit a possum on the way which was a slightly traumatic experience. Sadly the next day was spent driving as we headed to Auckland airport to drop Haley off and boarded our bus back to Hamilton, or Hams as we affectionately call it.

Location: Coromandel, Whitianga