The Coromandel Peninsula (December 29)

The girls and I started off the day with a workout in the hotel gym. Then they went for a run while I did a Yoga with Adrienne video — I had started a 30-day daily yoga plan before I left thinking yoga would be a great thing to do every morning of the trip. (Spoiler Alert: it didn’t last.) 

Since we hadn't made it yesterday, we thought we’d spend the first part of the day on Waiheke Island, but the girls ran by the ferry line and it was even longer than it had been! So, we decided to have breakfast in our hotel and then head directly to the Coromandel Peninsula. We called and reserved bikes for later in the day to ride to Hot Water Beach. 

We got to Hahei just in time to catch the shuttle to the start of the Cathedral Cove hike. We didn’t have any water with us, just a bunch of empty bottles and the hope there’d be a place to fill them up. When when we discovered there wasn’t, I suddenly got absolutely parched and fixated on needing to find water.

It was really hot and the hike we were going on was 45 minutes each way and really hilly. We were told there *might* be an ice cream truck halfway to the Cove, and luckily it was still there and they did have three bottles of water left. (I asked before we got in line and she must have sensed my desperation because she offered to save me one of them before I got in line.)  We took two bottles and didn’t even finish them during the hike, but I felt a lot better knowing they were there.  And, of course, once I felt more relaxed about the water situation, I celebrated that with some ice cream too!

Cathedral Cove was beautiful!!  We weren’t dressed to go in the water and the “waterfall” that sometimes streams from the rocks like a shower was merely a (very cold) trickle. 

We were running late for our reserved bikes but rather than a legit bike store it turns out the rentals were run out of a home by a very nice couple (Lisa and her husband) who just bought the bikes off a friend a few weeks prior. They were pretty new to the business of rentals and gave us lots of pointers.  The electric bikes were super powerful and riding them on the left side was super disorienting. I was starting to question whether these bikes were a good idea, but as we went up the first hill barely out of town, I was glad to have the extra power.  Jim was in front to start but started going super slow up the hill until his bike eventually just stopped. They replaced the bike for Jim and when we finally got out into the rolling hills of green, I relaxed and enjoyed seeing the beauty from the vantage point of a bike. We rode to the Hive restaurant which had a great vibe. We would have loved to stay there but the wait for food was over an hour, and we didn’t have that kind of time — we needed to get to Hot Water Beach at low tide.

The draw of Hot Water Beach is to come at low tide and dig a hole in the sand that fills with hot water from the cistern below. Unfortunately, there has been such tumult in the ocean lately that the low tide wasn’t particularly low, and it was already coming in by the time we got there.

We weren’t exactly sure where to go to experience this phenomenon but once we got there it was pretty clear where we were supposed to be (next to all those people!).

The bike people had included little digging shovels with the bikes and Rachel and Jim took turns digging holes. There were places close to the surf where you could just dig down with your foot a few inches and it was too hot to keep your foot there.

We returned our bikes and drove down the street to Woody’s Pizza, which really seemed as if it was in a campsite. But the pizza was good and the atmosphere was perfect.

We hadn’t been able to find a place to stay in Hahei, so we drove ½ hour to check in at our place in Whitianga — by the time we got all checked in, we now only had 11 hours until we needed to check out!

It was a great day!!