Kiyomi and Ren's Excellent Adventures: Cathedral Cove

December 20 - Coromandel Town

Sun, glorious sun! And none to soon. Coromandel Peninsula is basically a beach summer beaching area. Small towns, kitchy tourism, fish and chips, long, lazy summer days. We're told that half of Auckland comes up here for holiday, but thus we've managed to be just ahead of the holiday rush.

We started this morning by hiking the 30 minute walk into Cathedral Cove. Getting there reasonably early in order to enjoy it at low tide. The kids did surprisingly well given that there was some up and down. Ren clutching a new big beach shovel, Kiyomi excited to be somewhere new. The Cove is a little sheltered beach area that has become iconic in New Zealand (in part as it has been used for splashy ad campaigns for NZ travel). It's got a relatively gentle descending sand bar (although the surf is strong enough) and at low tide you're actually able to saunter out to the massive rock formations just off the beach (by high tide, they are still reacheable, but you have to swim). White sand, sun, surf - the kids were in heaven and wasted no time digging a great big hole (ok, well they got me to dig it, but it's really the principle of the thing).

The beach is bisected by a stone archway that leads into another bay, equally beautiful, but with an even more dramatic rock formation. The rock that makes up the formations has been eaten away by salt, and so appears almost porous (albeit with big honkin' pores). The bases of the formation in particular are being slowly eroded so the formations sit perched on ever narrowing perches. We spent a couple hours exploring, digging, generally beaching, and in that time, the beach filled up, including a flotilla of kayakers. When we arrived (around 9:30), there were about 5 or 6 others on the beach. We left behind maybe 50-60 people and passed another 30 or so heading in as we made our way to the car.

In the afternoon, we headed to Coromandel Town. which more or less sits at the head of the Peninsula. You may have noted that since being on the North Island, I haven't said much about the scenery. While it is pretty, it is not as wildly dramatic as what we experienced on the South Island. That said, the drive over the pass into Coromandel is worth noting. Dense, green forests with a mixture of connifers and palms. The palms provide a rather intricate layering and texturing to the forests. They spread wide and fall gracefully, a contrast to the typical conifer which reaches for height. After driving alongside this dense bush for a while, the blue of the coastal water jumps up as you come over the pass into Coromandel. It's hard to believe that an ocean sits so close to that intense green.

In Coromandel, the kids played in a local park (Kiyomi making friends almost instantly with a little girl who's mom worked at the mini-putt across the street). The vacation park is a little outside town, but as a rather interesting beach. Literally more shell than sand, the tidal flat reaches out to well over 500 meters at low tide. After dinner, the kids headed out there with pail and shovel, looking for sea creatures. Snails and clam shells were the most prevalent, and they watched as snails clustered and writhed over a clam shell, seagulls swooped for easy pickins', and the ocean retreated for the night. All in all, not a bad what to spend the evening.

Of note: the "cabin" we are staying in tonight is hilarious. It is basically a campervan, but without the van part. It's a small shack, probably the same size as our campervan if the cab could have been used as living space. It even has the same design with the seating area converting to beds. Adding to its weirdness is that it is the only cabin in the place and it sits right smack dab in the middle of the campervan field - plugged into a camper van outlet.