After a 4 hour ferry ride and a 14 hour bus ride to Auckland we have officially started our exploration of the north island. On first glance its pretty easy to be disheartened when you dont see an amazing view out of your window every 30 seconds, but the north island is defiantly warmer than the south so it already has a special place in my heart! We didn't spent too much time exploring auckland, but we'll be back there in a week or so i'm sure we'll get a good taste on round two. Our bus driver did take us to this cool volcano in the middle of town that has been turned into a park. From the top we got an amazing skyline view of Auckland, which surprisingly is dotted with quite a few dormant volcano peaks sporadically throughout town. Now, I'm no civil engineer, but this seems like a horrible place to build your countries biggest city!
So we left Auckland early on Tuesday en route to a town called Hahei, in the Coromandel peninsula, which is more or less a vacation home location for Aucklanders's. Our bus driver on the trip was an old timer that retired a few years ago, but was brought back for a few trips, of which ours was the first. This guy was like a kid in a candy store an kept everyone laughing with stories about all the horrible atrocities they've committed on buses in the past, as well as bad stories to tease other drivers with. So even though the scenery was diminished, the commentary was enhanced greatly.
Hahei turned out to be a beautiful coastal village, its very easy to see why the locals like it so much! As soon as we got there we set out on a tramp to the local attraction “Cathedral Bay.” The “cathedral” is a huge cave which is carved out of what looks like sandstone along the beach. Its pretty cool how large it is and the fact that the beach just kind of continues through it. Take a look at the pictures...they're much better at describing it than me ;).
The following day we decided to rent bikes and set out for a hot-spot called “hot water beach” (pun intended). Although it was completely swamped with people this was another crazy and cool New Zealand sight. Basically, there is a pocket of lava stuck deep underneath the beach which heats the water in a spring directly above it. This water then works its way to the surface in a really small area (say a 50 foot circle) and turns the water and sand just below the surface extremely HOTTT. You can rent a shovel from the office and dig out a little personal hot tub!!! Unfortunately our location picking skills along with bad wave timing ended up in 3 attempts (of lukewarm water at best) being knocked out of existence by huge waves...all well. We finally gave up and decided to just lay down in the surf where we were alternately blasted with freezing cold ocean water and scorching hot spring water as the surf pulled out the sand underneath us. Eventually the water singed our butts and feet so we decided it was time to retreat. Hot water beach 4 – Americans 0.
Lucky for us this place is also a big diving and snorkeling spot for local kiwis!!! The entire area is a marine reserve, so all the habitat is very intact with lots of fish and rock critters. We really enjoyed the dive here; substantially more than Picton. The visibility was about 45 feet and there was a ton of life to see. Including a nudibranch that the divemaster told us only lives on this one rock in the world...that might be BS though, you never can tell with these kiwis. Gina was less than impressed with the 55 degree water temperature though. I think her exact words were “i was miserable from the time i hit the water.” Me and joe were fine though....hrmmm...maybe we're better insulated :D.
