We headed out of Auckland at the crack of dawn yet again for a trip to the Coromandel on a less than lovely day in this weird unpredictable weather land of New Zealand. First stop was to the top of Mount Eden to have a little look at Auckland and I have to say that confirmed - it is a lovely looking city with a view of both the Tasman Sea & Pacific Ocean. As it was windy and rainy it wasn't exactly the nicest place to be but then I knew I wasn't here for the weather so all was good.
We took a nice little tour of Auckland and then headed off to the Coromandel to have a look at one spot that used to be full of little Kiwi Bach's as they are called (small kinda home built little holiday spots that were the Kiwi thing) which are now all being bashed down and replaced with very opulent kinda places with the helicopter pad & the boat spot and all that kinda malarky. Playground for the rich and perhaps famous.
We then stopped off at Cathedral Cove for a gorgeous 45 minute walk in the part rain part sunshine which given that there was a fair amount of uphill was not necessarily a bad thing as it got pretty warm & I suspect would have been less pleasant on a baking day. After our excercise for the day we went and had a little lookie see at the hot water beach which is an area that can be accessed at low tide where you can dig into the sand and access the hot water from below. As we were there when the tide was still highish we weren't able to actually get digging to experience it for ourselves but that is just one of those them things.
So instead, we decided to head off to a cute little winery with a nutty Kiwi for a little bit of wine tasting which was good fun and as they only use bentonite (a type of clay) to clear their wines I was able to try them all which was a most pleasurable experience. I even took a little bottle of delicious passion fruit liquer with me which was just delicious.
After getting into Whitianga in the pissing rain I opted to stay in for dinner and chat instead. There was an awesome American girl staying in the room next door who is doing a kind of thesis thing to investigate humans and their interaction with whales so she has been to Portugal & SA who are pro whales against hunting but aren't particularly active & is now in New Zealand, who along with Australia is particularly pro living whales & particulary active against the Japanese & her next destinations will be Japan & Norway so all very interesting chatting to her & as she picked up a South African boyfriend while she was in SA and spent 3 months there she was of course interested in talking to me so we were up until 3.30am. Joyous.
Back to Auckland again the following day to head up to the very top of New Zealand.
