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.