Hot tub in the sand
NEW ZEALAND | Monday, 8 March 2010 | Views [331]
3/8/2010 11:09 PM
Well last night was pretty interesting. Jess and I got into bed around 11pm to get a good night sleep for today’s early drive out of Auckland. Just as we crawled into bed, I turned to close the window, and noticed that crack-whore from earlier on in the day still sitting at the corner. Within about 20 seconds, another “crack-whore” walked up and gave her something, and then disappeared into the bushes for a minute or two. I grabbed Jess, and for the next hour and a half, we watched a fully operational prostitution / drug ring operate from that street corner. Filled with ladies of the night disappearing with approaching men around the corner, getting into cars, getting dropped off from cars, etc. We even managed to pin point shady men characters walking around the area that were undoubtedly their pimps. They’d disappear as well, and then a suped up American mussel car would pull up … hmm … I wonder who was in there. Haha. Absolute craziness --- can’t believe we watched all that from the 6th story window of our hostel. Lovely.
We hit the road this morning just after 8am. Our goal was to get to Hot Water Beach where we could dig a hole in the sand and have our own private hot tub. The only trick is that you need to get there two hours on either side of low tide. We got to the beach just past 11am, and low tide happened to be at 9am. That’d put us at the very end of the two hour window. Doh! Ah well, it was still a nice beach, and there was another opportunity for low tide at 8pm.
We spent a couple hours relaxing on the beach, until the high tide got too high for us to stay dry on the sand. Then we attempted to check into our hostel, but they didn’t have our room ready. Doh! That part ended up working out pretty cool though because the lady knew a guy who operated a hotel. He happened to have an available double bed, with a giant room, microwave, fridge, TV, free breakfast, and free wifi. Score! Ha. And it was the same price as the hostel. Amazing.
We headed into town to get some lunch, and passed by three guys on bicycles. They were all dressed in long sleeved plaid shirts, jeans, sombreros, scarves around their mouths, and sunglasses. One guy had a fabric cooler on his head with eyes cut out instead of the hat, scarf and sunglasses combo. Yikes. A little bizarre to say the least. Being that it was a small town, we swung by the Police station to report it. They seemed to know who the kids were and sent a squad car to shoo them away. Anyway, we finally got our lunch (lamb hamburger with yogurt mint sauce --- yum), and then onto the grocery store for beer and snacks. For some reason this had already felt like a long day, so we just relaxed at the hotel until low tide.
This town is really neat. It has one main street, with dozens of Mom & Pop shops with hand made colorful signs. Nothing is above two stories. And that main street leads right to the ocean. The whole town has (again) a really neat beach vibe. I’m sure it’s one of those places where everybody knows everybody. Seems like what a small town America/Canada city would be like in the 50s/60s.
At 7pm, we finally made our way to Hot Water Beach. Sadly, we didn’t have a lot of success. Low tide is key because the hot water is beneath the ocean in high tide. This day, however, there was a massive swell all up the eastern coast of NZ (3 to 6 meter swells). The swell was so massive, that they canceled the kayaking we tried to do earlier in the day. Basically, all ocean activity on the peninsula was canceled for the day because of the swell. This kinda foreshadowed our lack of success later with Hot Water Beach. Low tide is key, and with that big of a swell, low tide pretty much never comes. We weren’t the only ones at the beach … there were about 30 or 40 of us … all hoping to dig a hot tub, but no luck. I was probably the most furious digger of the bunch, and we had a good system going for a while, but really not much luck with a stable hot tub whole (the waves kept rushing over it too quickly to dig it out). However, you could really feel the hot water beneath the sand. At times, it was scorching hot (65 Celsius or higher). If you picked the right spot, you would get a mix of the 65 C water and some normal water. At one point, I did have a good sand / mud pool tub that was semi-warm, and if you sat inside of it, the sand on the bottom would scorch your feet and bum. So that was cool. Ha. But not quite as expected. Ahh well, it was a lot of fun trying to dig the hole and experiencing the thermal water beneath. After about an hour or so, we headed back to the hotel for dinner. We actually made friends with a local Kiwi and gave her a ride back to her hotel as well.
Nothing much was open by the time we got back to this town (9pm). The only place open was a Thai restaurant … so Thai friend rice it was. Now we’re back in the room, eating some popcorn (with lemon pepper seasoning … amazing), and probably going to bed any minute now.
