Mercury Bay

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Hello, i am back! After a few days on the road without much internet access, we are back in a "big" town and i hope to catch you all up on the events of the last few days.
After a nice stay with Bob and Pam in Auckland on the night of the 1st, the Kiwiexperience continued with an early morning pickup to travel to teh Coromandel Peninsula and Mercury Bay. After a quick tour of Auckland and the views of Mt Eden, we checked in with the Kiwi Tour office, to get everyone's schedule sorted out, and then it was off to the East Coast. We had our first stop in Thames. A little town that used to thrive on the gold mining industry about a century ago. Today, there is not much to do, but they did have a Pac-and-Save, which is one of the local grocery store chains, and we were able to stock up on supplies before we hit the road again. Our next stop was Hot Water Beach, and since we hit the beach just right (which is two hours before the tide rolls back) we were able to enjoy the warm thermal activity that bubbles up from below the sand once you dig a bit of a hole. A really neat experience, to create your onw little spa so to speak. After we all had enoug of the sun, we headed to our overnight stop in Whitianga and the Turtle Cove Lodge. A really nice backpacker hostel, and we (the kiwi people of the bus) were pretty much the only ones, we had the kitchen to ourselves, everyone cooked up some dinner, and then we headed of to explore the towns nightlife. Well really the one bar in town, Smittys to be exact, where the first national rugby game was shown on tvs all over the place, and since the kiwi bus has a ton of people from the UK on it, they felt right at home, and we all had quite a bit of fun.

Cheers, and keep on reading, since i am trying to catch up on my days, so there are more new blogs following this one.

SL

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