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July 25, 2005

Whitianga and the Coromandel

If rugby is the national sport of New Zealand, then tailgating and crazy driving are up there in second place. We took a trip out of the city last weekend and, after a white knuckle drive on the country roads of New Zealand we got to the Coromandel Peninsula. Coromandel sits on the Pacific Coast a couple of hours’ drive from Auckland.

We stayed in Whitianga (pronounced Fitianga) - bit of a nightmare for us wee Scots with the pronunciation of Maori place names (wh is pronounced f). Just takes a bit of getting used to.

We spent the day walking along the beach in the sunshine, pretty nice for the middle of winter. Decided to take a longer walk on the Sunday around an old gold mining area called Broken Hills. The walk starts as a bush walk up a steep hill to a lookout over the surrounding hills and out to the coast. Then you wind down off the hill and into a valley, where you come across the entrance to an old abandoned gold mine. Through here you walk 500m under the hill and out the other side. Very cool but a bit scary, nobody else around and did anyone know we were here? Hmmm. The walk is called Collins Drive, in case anyone reading this is in New Zealand.

After our walk we backtracked a bit until we reached Hot Water Beach, known as such because of the thermal springs that bubble up through the sand at low tide. We just rocked up with no shovel to dig with though, instead we just waited til some other punter had dug a hole, strolled over and jamp in, nae bother eh!

Posted by jon jack at 12:16 PM