Mem’ries Light the Corners of My Mind!

Along the Bay of Plenty

Tolaga Bay Wharf

Most Eastern New Zealand Lighthouse

Seal Crossing

The View from Our B&B

Maori Community Center

Kiwi Country

Katikati Mural

Overlooking Shakespeare’s Cliff

Don’t Feed the Pigs!

Kauri Tree

Another Hallucinogenic Mushroom

Cathedral Cove from the Water

Happy Memories

Tonight is the end of our second (and last) day in Coromandel Town, part of the Coromandel Peninsula, an area of New Zealand that remains among my fondest memories of our first trip to this country 20 years ago.

Before we reached the peninsula, we traveled three days along the Bay of Plenty, first to Gisborne and then to Hicks Bay on the second day. On the way to Hicks Bay, we stopped at the Tolaga Bay Wharf, which is 600 meters long! With the cloudless, bright blue sky and the glaring sun, the wharf seemed to go on into infinity. We also traversed yet another unpaved road in search of the most easterly lighthouse. I let Herman climb the 800 steps to reach the structure.

Now that the days are getting noticeably shorter, here south of the Equator, you tend to forget that perhaps driving on a dicey road as the sun goes down is not the smartest idea. I held my breath as we returned from the lighthouse, watching the arc of the sun as its trajectory trended downward and the shadows lengthened. I breathed a sigh of relief when we hit pavement again, but we still had to get dinner and find our accommodation, a bed and breakfast.

Did I mention that this area is very remote? That meant no street lights and hardly a house in sight, much less a restaurant. We found the entrance to the B&B but decided to first try and find something to eat. We stopped at a motel nearby, but the restaurant appeared dark, so we drove on. We stopped in what looked like a town (there was a small store and a school), but there were no restaurants! Fearful that we might have to knock on someone’s door and ask if we could join them for their evening meal, Herman spoke with the personnel in the store, who told us that the motel we bypassed did indeed have a restaurant. So, we went back and dubiously entered the establishment. Although dinner service didn’t start until 6 p.m., they did offer takeaway (take-out), so we gratefully ordered cheeseburgers.

Now, it was pitch black outside! We crawled down the road until we found the entrance to the B&B owner’s property and dubiously turned onto a long, dirt path that led to the house. By this point, the wind was blowing hard, and I was fearful that the rain might start at any minute. I was told that the key would be located in a lockbox. As we discovered the next morning when we tried to return the key, the lockbox was impossible to find, so we were lucky that the husband showed up right behind us.

We were so grateful to have reached our destination and it was so dark, that it wasn’t until the next morning when we realized that we’d spent the night in a little patch of paradise. You could see the ocean and the surrounding hills from either the bed or the cottage’s front porch, take your pick. And breakfast was home-cooked! Fortified for another long day of driving, we took off for Tauranga, the heart of kiwi (the fruit) country.

The distances between our destinations are not particularly lengthy, but highways in this country are rare and, in the Bay of Plenty and the Coromandel Peninsula, pretzel-shaped. Thus, the drive to Coromandel Town was l-o-n-g! However, we did enjoy stopping in Katikati, a town that features 75 murals on the sides of buildings in the town center.

When we finally reached the peninsula, the first place we stopped along our path of memories was the Cathedral Cove. You might recall this iconic spot if you’ve seen the second Narnia movie, where the children are magically transferred from a train station to a beach with a walk-through cave on one side and a huge rock in the water on the other.

Twenty years ago, the Cathedral Cove was something of a secret, and we had to hike through private farmland, a meadow, and over a high hill to make our way down to the cave entrance and the beach, both of which were only accessible at low tide. Now, the cove has become a popular tourist attraction, so a town (or at least a bunch of new homes) has grown up around it, along with an easier path to the water from the overlook where we stopped, brought about by the farm’s owners closing off access to the beach via their property. Our next stop was Shakespeare’s Cliff (or Overlook), where the varied colors of the water (shades of blue, green and purple) remind you of the colors of Paua shells. We ended the day by driving on yet another unpaved road (thanks to GPS directions), which led through an area of pigs and chickens roaming the road. There was a sign that warned one not to feed the pigs…okay.

During our first full day in Coromandel Town, I took the day off while Herman went wandering about, hiking among the kauri trees.

Today, Herman and I took a trip from the Whitianga wharf on a glass-bottomed boat with about a 300-horsepower motor. Boy, that little boat could move! We bucked over the waves as if we were riding a bronco in a rodeo. Yahoo! Along with a close-up view of Cathedral Cove and a cave formed from volcanic lava, we saw bottlenose dolphins (so close, you could almost touch them), red snapper fish and sea urchins.

We’ve decided that the peninsula is as far north as we want to drive, so we will now be turning south again, heading for Whangarei, 300+ kilometers from here. Oy!