Adventure Time

Recently I took a trip to the Hot Water Beach with some friends. It's a popular tourist spot on the North Island of New Zealand; I'd read about it multiple times before arriving and had heard about it from quite a few people. Needless to say, I was excited to go during the off season to avoid crowds of tourists and try out something so popular.
The idea is this: there is a beach with hot water springs and volcanic rocks under the sand. You dig a hole in the sand and it fills with hot steamy water, essentially like your own personal hot tub.
The walk to the beach was a muddy little path through the forest, then a nice, pretty, unassuming New Zealand beach. It's got these cool boulders all around that have volcanic looking pock marks in them, and we got there during high tide so we had to wade around all the rocks to get to where the action happens.
The actual 'hot water' area is just a tiny section of the beach, and I turned the corner to see a large crowd of people half dressed and toting shovels and buckets. The Kiwi in our group didn't hesitate to claim some territory and made us start digging away while the waves continuously crashed over our holes, filling them with sea water and making our efforts pretty futile. At this point I was still excited to dig up my own personal spa pool, so I didn't mind the cold raindrops that had started or bossy girl shouting directions at our failing attempts.
Finally, the tide went down and our digging actually resulted in a hole in the sand (about 2 inches deep at the most) which quickly filled with lukewarm/cool water. Looking around at everyone else's steaming pools and smiling faces, I felt like we'd done something wrong. Then a silent, small family made their way into our pool and quickly took over all of the personal space by lying flat on their backs in the middle of the hole. Our neighboring hole was empty so we scuttled over (shivering, covered in black sand), and found WARM WATER! I was excited and felt like all the hard work had finally paid off. Then I sat down. The sand was burning hot-like lava hot. No matter where in the hole I moved, the water was decently warm but the sand was extremely hot, which resulted in a painful, weird little dance around everyone else's holes in my neon pink bikini.

In the end I managed to sit in a somewhat warm little hole where I'd only burn a limb every few minutes, still shivering from the rain, where I finally questioned - why are we even doing this?