Whitianga

I am incredibly lucky to have friends who enjoy traveling as much as I do and last week was delighted to have travel buddies visiting from Europe. Although I didn't have the time off work to spend the entire duration of their visit traveling together, we did have a few delightful days of adventuring together. We checked out part of the Coromandel peninsula, a lovely part of the Eastern side of the North Island (I will eventually make it to the South island!).

We stayed at a friendly little hostel right on the beach in Whitianga. Not too much to the town but it is in a beautiful location with plenty of outdoorsey opportunities. We spent the majority of our time there either hiking or enjoying the beach. We had perfect warm, sunny weather so for the first time in my life I was at the beach when it should be wintertime (it is really hard to get used to the idea of summer-time in December).

The street our hostel was on. I want a palm tree :)

The first super cool place we went was called Hot Water Beach (technically not so cool, haha). There are hot water springs that run along the beach so if you take a shovel with you to the beach, and go at low tide, you can dig a nice hole in the sand which will fill up with hot water and viola! you have a sauna. You have to find a spot that has hot water as it doesn't cover the whole beach, and we quickly found there were pockets of hot water in big clusters with big areas of cold water in between. We had found a spot and made a decent spot to enjoy the hot water, but then got lucky and inherited a great hot pool from someone else that left.

Hot Water Beach

Was a bit cold when we had to jump in to wash off the sand

When the tide started coming in, we packed up our beach gear and shovels, grabbed lunch at a cafe, and headed off for a hike to Cathedral cove. It's a bit hard to describe, but it's a gorgeous bit of paradise that has a beach divided in half by a huge rock that has developed a cathedral roof from the bottom, so you can walk in (under?) and cross to the other half of the beach, although if it's high tide you have to wade a few feet.

We had steak pies and kumara chips :)

Hiking to cathedral cove

My first glimpse of the cathedral

The other side

Coolest. Rock. Ever. 

 The next day took us to Shakespeare Point, Lonely Bay, and Cook's Beach. I couldn't find a good explanation of why it is naked Shakespeare Point, but you get a panoramic view of the coastline that includes Flaxmill Bay, Lonely Bay, Cook's Beach, and some rocks that have names :)
Lonely Bay had some of the best seashells I've collected so far (my bookshelf now has almost an entire bookshelf dedicated to the shells I've collected......
Cook's Beach is quite possibly the prettiest beach I've ever seen. I'd try to describe it, but think I'm better to just post photos for you to see!

Flaxmill Bay

Tip of Shakespeare Point

Lonely Bay

Lonely Bay (you could climb from the beach under the big rock on left side of photo up to more rocks)

Cook's Beach

ps, I'm listening to Christmas music while writing about beaches, who could have ever thought!!!

If I ever have a van...

Made me giggle :)