Coromandel Peninsula

This weekend we went to check out the Coromandel peninsula, to the south east of Auckland. A couple of hours away from downtown Auckland, Coromandel is a popular getaway for the city folk who fancy a break. Whilst I may not particularly belong to the Auckland jet set, I was happy to join in the fun and check the place out!

We set off late on the Friday night, and stayed at this pretty cool pub/hostel, where we had a but of a lock in with some locals and travellers and stayed up to watch the Germany/ Argentina game (starting at 3am, so yeah, a bit of a lock in!)

This meant that we had a bit of a lie in on Saturday, but still managed to get around.

The highway that runs through the west coast of Coromandel is literally on the seafront, and the peninsula itself has some pretty wild landscape where the sea meets the mountains.


We checked out some of the beaches (awesome) then headed out to the famous Hot Water Beach, which I have now put as one of my all time favourite places. It's basically a beach, where because of some crazy geothermal activity, you can make your own spa!!
There are basically hot springs next to the sea front, so that at low tide you can actually dig a hole in the sand and take a steamy bath!!


You gotta bear in mind that we went there at night fall (low tide was at 530ish, which is about sunset here nowadays) so that it was pretty cold out, but we totally went for it, jumped in some of the pools and i have to admit that the water was very warm! you could definitely boil an egg in the sand! Awesome experience to run into the sea long enough to get refreshed then run back to the hot water pool!

That was actually a wicked night, we then headed over to a nearby backpackers and then proceeded to explore some nearby beached at night, so we had a campfire and roasted some marshmallows... mmmm....

Anyhow, i digress... the next day we went to check out cathedral cove, a beautiful beach on the east coast, and the weather was so warm, that even tho its actually winter over here, we went swimming to some rocks, where you could do some funky dives!


Our Coromandel expedition was then concluded with a visit to a nearby Kauri Forest. The Kauri trees are New Zealand's native trees, some of which are absolutely gynormous! We went tramping around a forest and came across an awesome waterfall (the water was freezing, but otherwise it would have been cool to do some jumps in La Pedriza style!)


And that's that, an awesome weekend for fun, but I guess football suffered with most of my favourite teams for the world cup being knocked off (too bad, England!)