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Published: September 2nd 2013
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Coromandel was to be our final stop in New Zealand before we returned to Auckland, where we would be flying to the Cook Islands. We left Rotorua at around 10am, and had a drive of around 3 hours or so to reach Coromandel. Once we reached the Coromandel Peninsula, the route took us right along the coast, literally hugging the shore as we went. Unfortunately, the weather took a sudden change for the worse just as we were within half an hour of our destination (it was lovely and sunny most of the way there!) and before we knew it, we were driving through torrential rain!
The storm had whipped up the sea a little and a big wave even splashed over the front of the car, which was a little scary but we were not really going very fast – you wouldn’t want to go any more than 50km per hour around those windy roads! Eventually we reached Coromandel Town and found the Abbey Court Motel where we would be staying. Thankfully, the rain had knocked off by the time we parked up, and we were soon checked in and given the key to our room.
The room
was really nice, bit gutted that we forgot to take a picture of it actually, but it was on the second floor and had large patio doors opening out onto a walkway outside the room, with great views of the surrounding countryside. It had a kitchenette, a small lounge area with a TV and a big bathroom with a HUGE walk-in shower. Very pleased with our accommodation, we took a trip into town to have a look around and to buy some food. There wasn’t a lot there, just a few small shops (most of which, for some reason, seemed to be closed), but we bought a few things from the supermarket and also some meat from the butcher just opposite.
The weather then reverted back to heavy rain, and we ran back to the car just as it really started to come down! It turned out that the weather would dramatically change like this often here – one of the locals stopped and spoke to us as we were sheltering under a shop front ready to run to the car and she said that you could get all kinds of weather in one day, you would just have
to look out to the clouds above the sea to predict what might come next!
The rest of our stay in Coromandel was affected by mainly rubbish weather, and we didn’t actually do much, as most things to do there were outdoors activities. We did take a drive when the weather was a little nicer out to see the rest of the peninsula, taking a loop around to the East side and back round again, we took us high up in the hills, along cliffs and through valleys, giving us plenty of great views, where we would occasionally stop along the road to take some pictures.
On the 14
th August we left Coromandel and drove back down the peninsula and around to Auckland. We were staying pretty much next door to the last place that we stayed in an airport motel (it was actually owned by the same company but the price was a little cheaper for this one this time!), and would enable us to take advantage of the free airport shuttle, as we would be dropping the car back the following afternoon.
The next day (our last full day in New Zealand), we drove into
the city (a good 20 minutes or so from by the airport) and then along the harbour to the Sea Life Centre. Amazingly, our Merlin Annual Passes that we had bought all those months ago in Sydney were valid here – best purchases we ever made – so we spent a couple of hours walking around here. The main attraction was the new penguin enclosure, and we spent a while watching the smaller penguins swimming around and the large Emperor penguins just standing around as they do! Of course, there were also plenty of fish and various other marine life to see, though we did think that it was quite small compared to other Sea Life centres that we visited in Australia.
We were then going to have a walk around the CBD and grab some lunch, and also use the Wi-Fi somewhere to check our emails as the internet was really expensive back at the motel. However, after driving around for a while looking for somewhere cheap to park, it seemed that we were looking at paying at least $6 per hour to park, so we instead decided to head back towards the motel and find a shopping
centre on the way.
We soon found a large Westfield shopping centre, where we spent a few hours walking around the shops, eating some lunch in the food court and using the free Wi-Fi offered there. Eventually, we returned to the motel, where we emptied out the car of any of our belongings, then took it back to the Apex depot. There was a shuttle bus that was just about to go to the airport, but the driver said that he would drop us back to our motel once he had dropped off the airport passengers, and we were soon back in our room after a little detour to the airport, where we would be returning ourselves the following morning to catch our flight to Rarotonga!
Auckland, from what we saw of it anyway, actually reminded us of the Sydney CBD, there were a few similarities like the harbour, the tower, the bridge and just the general busy atmosphere in the city centre
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