We had lunch on the beach at Whangamata, which was pretty crowded, as it was full of life guards training for the new season. It was also baking hot, and we decided to move on, having seen the new marina, the beach, and wandered around the shops. Retail therapy is such a good idea! We’d also, of course, sampled the local Decaf Soy Flat White coffee before buying sandwiches to eat on the beach.

We had planned to head up to Hot Water Beach, and Jillian & Gordon had kindly lent us their spade……….. OK, sounds bizarre, but this another geothermal highlight, and part consolation for moving from Rotorua to the coast and up the Coromandel. At low tide, it’s possible to dig for hot water springs on the beach, and create your very own thermal pool. We mis-timed low tide on the first day, so spent the night in nearby Hahei at a very swish motel. Sitting in the garden there, we spotted a very peculiar bird with a little crest-thing waving on its head, a fussy walk, and a lot of verbal, plus it’s mate. Looking it up later, we discovered that we’d seen a Californian Quail couple, who came right up to us until a Tui muscled in and frightened them off.

Hahei beach was beautiful, and we had a lovely swim in the sea. I reminded myself it was December! Although the motel was beautiful (and our most expensive night of the holiday), the owner had forgotten to mention that much of the community shut down that evening for the Christmas party. With our craving for fish & chips unsatisfied, we had a truly horrible tuna pasta meal, with what later events led us to believe was dodgy tuna.

After an interesting start to the next day, as the tuna made its presence felt, we headed off to Hot Water Beach in time for low tide around 10am. It’s such a bizarre sight – a seemingly normal small stretch of beach swamped by people frantically digging and making pools in the sand! It’s also extremely well named, as the water on our part of the beach was scaldingly hot, and it was quite a challenge to find some cool enough to sit in. We met a lovely American student over from Australia where she’s studying Marine Biology, and her mother. Together, we managed to construct a pool with enough incoming cool water from the tide to make it usable.