New Zealand

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This time we didn’t miss the tide. We got to hot water beach at 9.30am - two hours before low tide - and hired a spade from the shop at the carpark.

We trekked over to the area by the rocks where the hot spings were located and almost immediately realised our feet were burning! There were a few other groups of early birds, but we basically had the pick of the beach and decided to locate our hole just to the side of where the sand was the hottest. We took turns digging and as soon as we had a reasonable sized hole I stripped down to my swimwear and jumped in. Matt wasn’t impressed and insisted on digging around me and making our hole bigger and deeper for the next twenty minutes. He’s such a perfectionist! In the end he’d figured out where the hot spots were and dug channels in the walls of our hole to let in a warm (and sometimes very hot!) flow of water. We lay there enjoying our patch and watching as the beach filled up.

Right next to us was a patch of undug sand - it was undug as the sand there was way too hot to stand on let alone sit in. It was funny watching all of the newly arrived tourists looking for a patch to dig and then spotting what looked like a prime spot. They would walk over to it barefoot looking pleased with themselves, only to suddenly start jumping around when they realised the floor was too hot to walk on! Sometimes we warned them, other times we just had fun watching.

We could have stayed there for ages. The sun was shining properly at last and we were sitting in what felt like a hot bath on the beach looking out across the waves. Unfortunately our eye was on the time and we had to get moving if we were to make it to Rotoroua by the evening. We reluctantly gave away our hole, which it seemed was far superior to most of the others around us thanks to Matt’s digging efforts, and headed to the car park for a cold shower where we made poor attempts to remove all of the sand that we were caked in.

Back in dry clothes, we drove down the rest of the peninsula, stopping to look at odd beaches on the way. When we arrived at Whangamata we decided to stop for a bite to eat as the logic was that eating out would save us time (that‘s how I persuaded Matt anyway!). We found a cute little burger bar called Soul Burger which did a mean burger and we sampled our first drink of NZ L & P.

Back on the road we managed to make it to Mount Maunganui. We had a quick walk around and did a few stops on the long beach, before heading to the supermarket to stock up on some more food.

We managed to get to Rotoroua by 6.30pm which was much better time than we’d expected. As we drove into town I told Matt off as I suddenly got a terrible whiff. I laughed so much when I realised it wasn’t him that had made the smell - we were now in thermal spa land. Unfortunately we’d ignored the fact that some motor camps said in their ad ‘no smells’ and had gone for one close to town. There was plenty of smell at ours. You sort of got used to it after a while.

We had so much to do in the evening, from transferring and naming our photos, to deciding which attractions to go to see tomorrow. We really want to see everything in one day but it looked like there was going to be too much to do for that.

To save time, and because Phil had sold the place so well to us, we ordered a takeaway Hell’s Pizza. I was so impressed when the delivery driver drove up to our van with our order as it was dark and it was a big campsite. It was pretty good, and meant I‘d had a whole day off cooking!

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