Coromandel Peninsula - Driving Creek Railroad

Just 3km north of Coromandel Town is this little railroad built by potter Barry Brickell, who over a period of 30 years designed and built this 15" gauge railroad, which he used to bring clay and pine to his kiln at the bottom of the hill. It seems he became a little obsessed with railways and now it's 3km long and goes up a few hundred meters through what is slowly becoming a Kauri conservation area. They've planted about 9000 Kauri hoping that one day the area will resemble what it did in ancient times, with ancient Kauri trees being over 600 years old before they naturally fell.

Anyways, super cool stop. Can't believe this potter made the whole railway here, there's tunnels and bridges and everything. I think the trains themselves were also made to fit! Pretty cool.

They had 3 different trains, all with different names... Ours was Linx, this one was Snake.

Look at this amateur bridge! So cool. 

Oh yeah, riding the railroad, all the live long day.

Part of Coromandel Harbour! 

It's us! We're up at the top of the railroad, at "Eyefull Tower"... Love it!

Just look what you could do if you had enough time and drive! 

Double Decker bridge! Don't know if I'd drive two trains on it at once though, hmm.

Coromandel Peninsula - The Waterworks

This place is super cool! Waterworks: A theme park dedicated to water. All kinds of little water toys to play with and the coolest playground I've seen in... probably forever! They just don't allow playgrounds like this in Canada / North America. Two zip lines, one of them was through the forest... It was just a fantastic time. If you're heading between Whitianga and Coromandel Town on the 306 road, make it a stop for sure. :)

Waterworks!

Biking keeps you slim!

Now Jacqui's the slimjim biker

Human hamster wheel! This was way harder than I expected!

I totally felt like E.T.'s Elliot

Weeee!

Zipline time!

Ahhhhh, holy shit!

lol, man, so much fun in that playground... Loved the ziplines... self serve, no observation from staff!

Coromandel Peninsula - Waiau Kauri Grove and Waiau Falls

We just stopped at these two little roadside attractions on our way from Whitianga through to Coromandel Town on the 306 road. Definitely a pretty narrow winding road but pretty fun overall... And definitely worth it to see these two stops!

Kauri trees are native to New Zealand but due to their size and the greediness of man, most were cut down (after 600+ years of growing to massiveness) to be converted into paper and lumber... :( There's still a few to be found though, and the Kauri Grove here didn't disappoint.

Kauri are big!

And tall!

Way bigger than a Jacqui!

Water flows peacefully through the grove...

An excellent view Jacqui found... nice little pool in the creek!

After that we drove just a short distance further and found Waiau Falls, which was super duper pretty for a small waterfall like this. :) Definitely worth the stop and short 2 minute walk from the car!

Purty!

So are we! :)

Beetroot on burgers is delicious

McDonald's NZ feature burger
- has beetroot and egg (I'm indifferent to the addition of egg). I wish it had avacado too!

Driving in New Zealand

Wee! So as you saw a few days ago, we own a van here... And even before that we had a Camry that we were using to get around to get our errands done... As such, I've noticed a bunch of things while driving, and also being new to the left-hand driving bit, that was an experience in itself.

• Driving on the left is actually better. It's taken some getting used to and I'm still not awesome at thinking of the proper lanes to be in and stuff, but it's totally true that with a right dominant eye, left side driving makes more sense. Thanks a lot, teamsters.
• Driving on super windy (as in winding; a windy path) roads up some of the steepest slopes and with thin lanes and no shoulders is pretty harrowing. Especially when you commonly see signs saying that the road is narrowing or that there's a one lane bridge up ahead (we must've passed over 50 one lane bridges by now)...
• A stretch of mountain road here might have 20-30 switchbacks, kind of like the road to Hana in Maui but even worse as there's no ocean reference on one side... It's just a big winding tunnel!
• It's almost impossible to go the speed limit here. The aforementioned windy roads are almost all 100kmph roads, straight up and full of turns... I get tailgated all the time... Then I see this:

Yep, that's a logging truck. And yep, that's a 2 lane (bidirectional) road. wtf.

Anyways, it's an experience. But if my parents come to visit, I think I'll do everyone a favour and volunteer to drive instead of letting my dad. ;) He knows why.

Coromandel Peninsula - Cathedral Cove and Hot Water Beach

We are staying in the town of Whitianga ("fit-i-anga"?) for a couple days. It's a small town on the east coast of the Coromandel peninsula. The beaches all along this coast are AMAZING. And the drive was pretty neat too, through lots of dense tropicalish forest.

Jurassic Park?

Today we did a short walk from Hahei to Cathedral Cove - you may recognize this rock arch from the Narnia movies! It was a nice walk which hit some other secluded beaches along the way. It was a beautiful day for going to the beach, which was fortunate since yesterday was rainey. Yay good luck! The only bad part about today: Scott lost his sunglasses in the waves. At least they weren't expensive ones.

Stringray Bay (picture stitched together from multiple shots)

Narnia?

This island is awesome. Look at that little bird, lol.

Yep, we're really here!

More evidence we're in Narnia

Scott lost his sunglasses :(

We also went to the Hot Water Beach, which is one of the coolest things I've ever experienced. During low tide there is a section on the beach that has hot water flowing down from the rocks (under the sand). So if you dig out a pool for yourself it is like sitting in a hot tub! 

Hot Water Beach!

It took us awhile to figure out how to do it properly...when we arrived there were already lots of people soaking in steaming pools. So we started digging a hole, but the water wasn't noticibly warm. We thought we probably just needed to dig deeper to the warm water. But after awhile it was obvious that our pool was not going to be a hot pool. We tried again right next to other hot pools, but once again no amount of digging got us to warm water. Confused,  I wandered over to the middle of a bunch of other pools to test the water temperature and scalded my feet on the burning hot water that was flowing out from the sand. So apparently the hot water IS there, it is just very localized to a few streams. Once we had that figured out it was just a matter of digging a pool in the sweet spot on the edge of the hot water, so the pool was a perfect mix of warm :)

Our first pool attempt

"I think we are doing something wrong"

Front Left: Our ice cold pool full of sea water
Back right: Others enjoying their nice hot pools. WTF?!

Yay we finally have a hot pool!

There was not a lot of real estate on the edge of the hot water stream, but we were lucky enough to arrive as some others were leaving and they let us take their pool. We had a well-deserved soak and chatted with some of our pool neighbours. We also helped some other confused pool-seekers to the right place to dig (since we were now experienced hot water beach gurus). 

View from our hot pool paradise

Enjoying our hot pool

The hot pools require quite a bit of upkeep because the flowing water quickly erodes the sides of the soft sand puddle. But it was a fun activity to dig on the hot or cold side depending on the temperature adjustment that was necessary. Also as the tide continuted to go out the water level in all the upper pools went down, so eventually our pool was pretty shallow. But by then we were ready to leave and passed down our good location to another group.  

Dogwood Green

A couple days ago we went to visit a rental home that is available from Christmas - March. It's located on a small 2 acre farm near the city of Tauranga on the Bay of Plenty. This rental oppurtunity is a bit special because we would be required to look after the farm during our stay. The only animals are sheep and chickens so it's not too difficult - the sheep need to be let into different areas of the field every few weeks and the chickens need feeding nightly (but the neighbours can help out if we want to go away for a few days). These small duties mean that we get a pretty awesome house for a reasonable price. Also as a bonus the owners have an extensive garden that we can eat from. VERY extensive - I can't remember all the things they grow but it's more than we could eat. So basically all we need to buy from the store is beef and ketchup for Scott :)

There's lots of nice areas for Dexter to walk and some streams nearby for swimming. And of course the ocean is only a short drive away for us all to enjoy the beach! I'm really looking forward to staying here!

The owners are really nice and invited us to have dinner with them and stay over in the guest room. I think they are quite pleased that we will be looking after the place for them while they take a holiday on the south island. They had been looking for renters for a long time and had almost given up and canelled their trip. I think commiting for the full 3 months was difficult for other holidayers, but it was perfect for us!

Only took one picture on our visit, but there will certainly be more when we are living here :)

Chickens and rooster that we will soon be looking after!

Ruakaka rental is a go!

The owners were a bit hesitant to let us sign a lease for only 2 months, but now they have agreed! We are limited by 2 months because we need to be at our next rental place by Christmas (more info to come once we find internet for our laptops...I am writing this from my phone and it's not really good for long posts or pictures!)

We are bumming around the Coromandel area until Wednesday when we get to pick up Dexter! Then we will head north to our new home for the next 2 months :)

Yay!

What the Whuck

In NZ the "wh" sound is pronounced "f". So combo that with the kiwi accent and the city Whangarei is actually pronounced "fung-ga-ray". It's pretty confusing... it took us awhile to figure out where people were talking about!

We have more to post as soon as we find internet...be patient :)

Ruakaka

Today we drove to Ruakaka to check out a house that we might rent. It was our first big drive in Binney, and he was great! It was nice to get out of the city...Auckland is a cool city, but it's a pain to have a car there. 

Ruakaka is a little town on Bream Bay about an hour and half north of Auckland. It has an awesome beach, and apparently the surfing there is quite good too. The house we looked at was nice, but we will have to see if we can get a rental length that fits in with our plans (there is another place available starting around Christmas that we are interested in...more on that tomorrow).

We are staying the night in Ruakaka so we spent the afternoon at the beach. First "vacationy" afternoon we've had in NZ so far, so yay! It's spring here so it's not super warm yet, but Scott still went in the ocean.  I spent my beach time finally getting back into Dance with Dragons, I've neglected it for so long! Nice to finally have some relaxing time :)

Here's a few pics from the beach! Forgot to take any others of Ruakaka, oops. If we end up renting the house here then there will be plenty of opportunity for more :)

Ruakaka

Such a pretty beach, and we have it all almost to ourselves!

Scott braved the chilly water

I opted for relaxing on the beach instead

Look at this sand dollar go!

We bought a van!

So the other day when we got to Auckland we went over to the Backpackers Car Market and saw a few vehicles there, though none were too impressive. One of them was painted rather fantastically and led us to some ads on Trademe from Escape Rentals, who were selling a number of vans from their fleet, including this one, Binney!

They are all painted pretty awesomely, but of the ones available, we liked this one the best.

Only 404000km on it! What a steal! We got it inspected down the road in Glen Innes at VTNZ, seemed everything was in order... So now we have even more paperwork to complete getting the registration transferred over to us... Wee!

All Blacks Parade!

This was pretty exciting, though really we got there as an afterthought, so we were way at the back out of the crowds, but still a pretty fun experience. Pretty sure we could make out the captain and coach and also the cup itself we definitely saw!

Our hotel was on this road way down, so it was completely unreachable... lol. We ended up parked there for 24 hours, for $24. :(

Visiting Dexter

We saw Dexter today! It was our first time seeing him in NZ, because he had to go directly into quarantine when he got off the plane (the quarantine people picked him up). We visited his quarentine facility Pet Haven which is 40min south of Auckland. It's a really nice place with friendly staff, so hopefully he isn't having toooo horrible of a time.

Family back together again!

Nice drive on the way out to see Dexter

Dexter's cosy bed

Dexter has an exciting view of cows from his kennel

Dexter was so excited to see us! He couldn't stop giving us kisses and jumping up (bad puppy!) We stayed for about an hour and gave him lots of pats and playtime. He had his toys that were with him on the plane, and miraciously they weren't destroyed yet. We'll see how they last over the week - while we were there the ear came off his bunny toy and he was super excited to see some stuffing coming out. Ripping stuffing out of toys is pretty much Dexter's favourite pasttime, so he is probably hard at work with that right now :)

Hugs!

Kisses!

"I love getting pats!"

Tug o war!

It was sad to leave, and Dexter was sad too :( But hopefully he knows that we will be back to take him home eventually! Maybe we will even have a home by then :) He has to stay in quarantine for 10 days, so we should be able to pick him up mid next week.