This was long day – the fishermen woke us up early as we were half blocking their site. Never mind, we had plenty of time because of this. We also got a warning not so camp outside campsites on Coromandel Peninsula, as it isn’t allowed (and you must know it, there is no sign when you entering this location).
After breakfast we moved to Coromandel
, did a quick research what to see there and hit the road again – to the north. Just before Colville we stopped at Mahamudra retreat centre to relax a bit and took some photos. It was nice there with some people doing Taichi or any other similar sport.
And then we hit the „traditional“ roads over there – gravel, narrow and steep. The nature around is awesome, really isolated, with a lot of nice views. We also got flat tyre for the first time, luckily we were almost back in Coromandel and they had service there.
Bought a lot of meat and went to Waiau Waterworks – the main point of our today’s program. They have free BBQ for their guests and the park is ful of, how can you guess from its name, water toys. How to play with water in 56 different ways, some attractions are just for looking, but a lot of them you can control and do what you want. For example bikes you use to pump a water in direction you want or fighting tower, where you can fight against two other (of course I tried and of course I was completely wet 🙂
Time just fly around us and we quickly moved to other attraction on road 309. Waiau Falls was next in line and it looks like nice small falls with small lake underneath. Somehow expected a bit more we moved forward, to Kauri Grove and Kauri Twins. These are one of the oldest trees in New Zealand, were used in history for masts and these few here survived by some accident.
All we wanted to see on road 309 and in a second (which took an hour) we moved to Cathedral Cave. It is a cave on the beach (about 40 minutes walk from parkplace), which is possible to go through in low tide and which should be full of water in high tide. We arrived just in the middle, still able to go through with dry shoes, just Tomas had a bad luck and water wet his shoes as he payed attention to something interesting in his camera.
Almost night, we know it is impossible to enjoy the Hot Water Beach, where in low tide you can dig a hole with hot water flowing. Doesn’t matter, moving there for a dinner and while preparing it we speak to some other travelers who are interested in our car. We did our first car promotion, ate the dinner and hit the road again.
At midnight we finally found some place to sleep – at lookout behind Waihi. The night was quite, just two or three cars came around, had some noisy fun and when they found Tomas sleeping outside, they quickly left.