Its a great view (if you can see through the fog)

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Today it was Carol Anne’s birthday so leaving Gisborne was certainly a good idea. It was cloudy when we left but what we were in for we could have never imagined. The road round the East Cape is meant to be really scenic but shortly after we started driving the heavens opened and it started to rain, hard.
By the time we had reached the top of the East Cape you could barely see the road in front let alone the lovely views. This part of the island is hardly populated at all so we had no choice but to keep driving on. It also seemed to have no petrol stations either and having spent so much time staring out of the windscreen trying to see where to go I completely missed the fact that the tank was on empty. We hit a T junction and looked at the map. Deciding the town to the left looked bigger we headed there. No petrol. He had run out 2 days ago. So we headed back the way we came and went right. I’m sure I suggested that in the first place. Finally just as the tank ran dry we found petrol.
The only accommodations was a further 60km along the road in Whitianga. We drove through several fields and down a bank to the seas edge. There at the bottom nestled in behind the cliff was the hostel. Thank god the tide was out.
It was a lovely place even though they had only just got electricity installed. We sat out the rain and by the following morning the sun was shining again.
We continued onto Whakatane and stayed in a lovely house in the town. This was just a stop off on the way to Tauranga which we reached the following day.
Tauranga is a large town and like all large towns the hostels are shit because they don’t have to care they get the people regardless. After dropping our stuff off we headed out to Mount Manganui on the coast and spent some time climbing the cliff and walking the beach there. This was a much nicer place and we wished we had stayed here.
Over the last few days we had felt cheated as the weather had been so bad we seemed to have missed quite a bit of scenery. Unfortunately we cannot wait for the good weather otherwise we would have run out of time and would not have got everything in.
The next morning we were out of Tauranga and on our way to the Coromandel Peninsula.

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