The last bit

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Route

Kauaeranga gorge - Athenree - Tairua - Whitianga - Waiu - Thames - Kauaeronga Valley - Auckland - Waiua Pa - Waiheke (Oneroa) - Auckland

Miles

50

Things I’ll miss

Fabulous creamy ice-cream - especially Kapiti. Great café’s with good coffee, excellent home baking and a kiddies toy box so you can sit and read the papers. Well kept play parks, and public swimming pools with saunas, steam rooms and Jacuzzis all on the pool side. Whitakers Peanut slabs - yummy. Doc campsites - always in gorgeous locations. Swimming in clean rivers and lakes. Clean public lavatories. Having my bags packed at the supermarket checkout. Not being expected to tip. The weather!! The honesty and natural friendliness of Kiwis. Great wine in restaurants - by the glass if you want and not 3 days old either! Pukekos. Hot water pools. The great outdoors.

Things I won’t

Boy racers. Fuzzy TV reception. Camp sites full of campervans. Cold draughty houses. The treaty of Whaitangi. Rugby. NZ road surfaces. Kiwi pronunciation - to name but one: 'wh' is pronounced 'f' and there are too many places beginning Whaka....

Diary

We took a couple of days to get to the Coromandel proper, stopping off to swim at all the hot springs on the way and we also did a really nice circular walk in the Kauaeranga Gorge which took in an old railway tunnel over 1km in length.
Once on the Coromandel we spent some warm afternoons playing on the beaches and picking cockles. We also visited Hot Water Beach, which as the name suggests has a hot water spring on the beach. Once there you hire a spade and dig yourself your own hot water pool. Sounds great on the surface until you realise that: as fast as you dig the damp sand collapses; the water is scalding, so you need to dig a large enough pit for you to sit well away from the boiling water trickling in the top side and you need a big enough surface area to cool the water so you can actually bear to sit in it. Basically you wallow in ankle deep water - which is fine as long as it isn’t windy - and there will be another 650 people on the beach doing exactly the same thing, but as the hot water only extends about 20 meters in each direction you are cheek by jowl with your neighbours..and you have no choice of which cheeks!
In Whitianga we splashed out for a trip on the glass bottom boat, now that the holiday season is well and truly over we had the boat to ourselves. The boat takes you into the Marine reserve past some very interesting coastal features names by Captain Cook. Such as Shakespear’s point - because Captain Cook thought the profile had much in common with Shakespears - did he really have such a huge nose and slack chin…or is that modern day weathering of his features? We also saw some blow holes and interesting caves. We also spent a good hour with our noses pressed against the glass bottom of the boat - Thea just laid herself across it - looking at Crayfish, sea urchins, snapper, John Dory, blue cod, and heaps of other fish. In the afternoon we drove across the peninsula and spent the afternoon at the Waiau Waterworks - our plans for a walk having been runined by the closure of the access road due to logging. The Waiau waterworks was fabulous fun, with pedal powered water pistols, a hampsters wheel, flying foxes, a cycle roundabout, and a water channel for racing toy boats, and we had the whole place to ourselves.
The following day in Coromandel town itself, we visited the highly recommended Driving Creek Railway. Like the Waiau waterworks the ingenious construct of just one man, but this time on a much larger scale. In need of a way to transport clay to his potting wheel this chap had built a small railway to bring the clay down from his pit high up the hill. A succession of holiday makers keen to ride the train over the past 15 or so years has resulted in the railway being extended high up the hill with an expansive area of kilns and furnaces for artisans below. The train ride is spectacular involving zigzags of train track up the steep hillside. These require the train to be driven first forward and then in reverse to get up the zig zags, there is also a double decker bridge and some tunnels.
The following days were filled with more hot springs, some nice walks and a trip to see Shrek III. On the last day with our camper van we visited Howick Village, which is a village of preserved homes from some of New Zealands first white settlers. The group they focus on here are the prematurely retired service men who were encouraged to come with their families and settle in New Zealand to defend it from the threat of French and other colonial powers with it in their sites. They never actually had to fight an invasion, and though they lived in tents for the first couple of years and then very rudimentary accommodation after that, many of them actually escaped the Irish potato famine and lived well into their 80’s over double the life expectancy if they had stayed. Dinner was of course dumplings as we were back at Jennys unpacking the van and within Jiao zi territory.
We dropped the van the following day and stayed with a family we had met in the south island. The girls reveled in a whole day of play with 2 other children. After that it was back on the bikes and back to catch the train at Papakura. In fact we have discovered that the term ‘ to get off the train at Papakura’ means to get yer leg over - typically we have only got on there…TWICE!
From the train we caught the boat to Waiheke island and treated ourselves to a B & B. We spent a day cycling round the island and exploring the old WW II defence tunnels. The cycling was pretty tough as there is not a single flat kilometer on the island it is just a constant 33 miles of up and down. The girls both wanted to go with Ben so he had one on the back and the other in the trailer…well it’s essential he keep up his training after all! I kept up mine with a soak in the Jacuzzi and a bottle of pink fizz once the girls had gone to bed.
After Waiheke it was back to Auckland via an afternoon looking round the galleries of Devenport, for more swimming, shopping, museum, dumplings and dim sum - oh and packing. ‘Cos that’s it we’re all done, and this time tomorrow we’ll be about ¼ of the way through our mind numbing return to old Blighty. See you all soon.

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