Tauranga and the Pinnacles Walk
After our brief stopover in Rotorua, we were ready to make our way to the coast!
Tauranga
Still picking up the sticks from our Tongariro Crossing rescheduling, we had a variety of 11th hour lodging rearrangements. An AirBnB we had booked at the last minute canceled on us at the last(er?) minute, and we scrambled to find a same-day replacement from the Rotorua tourist information office.
Fortunately, that replacement was hosted by an incredibly gracious couple who not only were quick to let us stay, but also prepared us fantastic continental breakfasts every morning with homemade muesli, yogurt, coffee, bread, and jam. Where so many places the website hosts are “BnBs” only in name, this one really felt like the homey, “get-to-know-your-hosts” experience that originally started the company. One of the hosts even took Dagmar to play pickleball, a less physically- and technically-demanding racquet sport than tennis which is rapidly gaining popularity with older populations. We also made friends with their gorgeous mini-lion, TJ!
Overall, this was a great place to lay around and recuperate for a couple of days. We know it seems like we constantly talk about AirBnBs and lazing about on this blog, but with our nomadic lifestyle resulting in a lodging situation continually looking like the famed Wallace and Gromit train chase, every opportunity we had to actually leave our suitcases unpacked for more than one night was a luxury to be savored!
We actually had doubly-nice AirBnBs around Tauranga, moving into a bonafide tiny house after a couple of days! We’ve talked several times before on the blog about our sudden enthrallment with tiny houses, watching tons of house tours, and trying to get involved in their construction via HelpX. We haven’t bored you with additional stories such as getting a personal tour from a tiny-living couple Dagmar met via Instagram, and visiting a random construction company specializing in them. As we were planning the last month of our trip, Stefan did an extensive search along their itinerary to find at least one they could try out before he left. It turned out there were only two which met that sweet central circle of the Venn diagram of quality, affordability, and availability. We were lucky enough to secure a booking with one of those two!
The tiny house we chose actually ended up being featured on the YouTube channel we watched so much of! We absolutely loved staying there, and the size was perfect for the two of us, even when doing our Insanity workouts while watching The Chase. Maybe if we lived there long term and had to negotiate two people working from home, we would have preferred a door between us, but it seems like the optimal setup for a tiny house is someplace where you can spend more time outside anyway, which hopefully would incentivize using that for separation. In any case, our only complaint was, as you can see in the video above, the house being located right next to a busy road, which did make for a lot of noise. Even so, we finally got our tiny house stay and loved it!
But it wasn’t all lounging about on AirBnB sofas! Believe it or not, we actually used some of our time to see the area we’d visited. The biggest attraction of note was Mount Maunganui, a lava dome situated next to the water and overlooking part of the city. With a short (but steep!) hike to the top, you’re treated to some great views, and it seemed to be a very popular lunchbreak walk for locals.
After a brief breather at the picnic tables located at the top, we headed down to the beach to another popular Tauranga attraction: Leisure Island (or Moturiki Island, depending on who you ask). This island once served as a sort of fortress for Maori and is connected to the mainland beach with a man-made land bridge.
It, too, was just a quick jaunt out and back, but we saw some nice wildlife and what we thought was a whale, but ended up just being a rock… Showcasing New Zealand’s rapid weather shifts, the sunshine we enjoyed at the top of Mount Maunganui had turned into sideways-driving rain by the time we crossed the land bridge, and then promptly back into clear skies once we got to the end of the island. That last development gave us a beautiful double rainbow! Incidentally, Stefan just learned from a podcast that a second rainbow always has an inverted order of colors from the first due to the extra bounce it takes inside the rain droplets.
Having wrapped up our time in Tauranga and having recuperated our strength, our next stop was a two-day hike!
Pinnacles Walk (Kauaeranga Kauri Trail)
On the way, we briefly passed through the small town of Paeroa, notable as the place where New Zealand fizzy soft drink L&P was created. Humorously marketed as “World Famous In New Zealand,” L&P somewhat confusingly stands for “Lemon and Paeroa.” That name might not make a lot of sense, but we have fond feelings for it after having been introduced by our hosts at HelpX #3, where we regularly relished cooling off with a can of L&P after hot days of lamb-wrangling and poo-scooping. Wanting to get our hike started as soon as possible, we unfortunately didn’t stop in the town to enjoy one, but we at least can say we drove through!
The hike we were gunning for was the Pinnacles Walk (not to be confused–as Stefan invariably does when talking about it–with California’s Trona Pinnacles, which Stefan had previously visited on another camping expedition with a friend from grad school). This wasn’t quite one of New Zealand’s Great Walks, but we were running too short on time to do another one of those, and the Pinnacles Walk was one of the attractions we saw consistently recommended in the region of the Coromandel Peninsula. Having survived a 3-day tramp through ankle-deep mud and the 19.4 km Tongariro Crossing, we figured this simple 2-day out-and-back hike would be easy going for us.
Boy, were we wrong! First things first, the time window we had for the trek coincided with a nasty landslide knocking out the road leading up to the trailhead. So rather than starting there, we parked at the visitor center and had to hike an extra 5 miles up a winding gravel road before getting “started”. After that, the trail started going up, up, up, and stayed that way for the entire day. Whatever energy we had stored up with our laying around quickly dissipated as we chugged (un)steadily uphill!
The hike itself was pretty enough, with swing bridges crossing streams and winding through forest paths, but we barely made the hut at the top by sunset and our legs were completely thrashed!
Even though we were in the more temperate north, winter had definitely arrived and the hut itself was quite chilly. We spent the majority of the time before bed huddling as close as we could to the firewood stove in the kitchen and away from the uninsulated greenhouse-style area with overflow seating. There was actually a fairly large crowd staying in the hut, and while we were definitely the weakest of the lot, our strategy of staying near the heat was shared by many and things got a little crowded! The upside was that it gave us plenty of opportunity to chat with other people, and one group let us join in their card games they were playing (we don’t remember specifically which game it was at this point, but it was one of those social deduction style games a la Werewolf).
Stefan fought to stay near the heat as long as possible but nearly fell asleep in the middle of the card game, and soon enough we retreated to the bunkhouse. This was even colder and unfortunately since we had–typical for us–been basically the last hikers to drag themselves to the hut, we missed our opportunity to get any of the double-wide bunks near the center where we could have huddled for warmth. Instead, we got the single-wide ones next to the wall. This initially wasn’t an issue as we were both so tired we fell instantly asleep, but partway through the night we both woke up teeth chattering and any part of our body sticking out of the sleeping bag freezing. So we did our best to make do by contorting ourselves to curl up side-by-side on a bed width made for 1, and eventually managed to make it through the night.
The next morning after breakfast, rather than going straight back down the mountain, we set out to do the final uphill stretch of the hike to the pinnacle rock formations themselves. Even though our legs were tired from the previous day, it was comforting to know that we didn’t have that far to go. The final stretch of the trail turned to a literal ladder climb, with metal rungs hammered into the boulders in several locations. Between the cold, the wind, and uncertainty about the ladder climbs, Dagmar initially decided she didn’t want to head all the way to the top, so Stefan continued alone. After enjoying the 360 views at the top, he came back down and reported back to Dagmar. Seeing that Stefan had not, in fact, fallen to a grisly death, Dagmar decided if she had come all this way, why not do the final stretch. This time, Stefan stayed behind in order to save his strength for the return, and in the end, both of us got to enjoy the views on our own!
The round trip to the top of the Pinnacles took about an hour before we were back at the hut, at which point we hurried back down the way we had come the previous day. Neither of us are big fans of out-and-back hikes due to the repetetiveness of the return journey, and we can’t say there was anything we saw on the way down that we had missed on the way up. With exhausted legs and a bad night’s sleep, we were mostly just looking to get back to our car as soon as possible. It was here that the extra couple of miles due to the landslide really took their toll on us–the last few miles trudging down the gravel road seemed to drag on forever!
In the end, we calculated that the extra stretch was around 9 kilometers, 18 both ways–just 1.4 km short of the Tongariro Crossing which had also left us feeling exceptionally gassed, and that’s before even starting the actual hike. Granted, the Pinnacles Walk was split over two days, and we have no idea what the altitude gain was in either one of the two, but looking back, we felt so much more exhausted and demoralized with the Pinnacles Walk.
Maybe it was the lack of sleep, maybe it was the previous day’s unrelenting up-up-up with no real change in scenery until the very end, maybe we had just been overly optimistic in expecting that a 2-day tramp would be easy, or maybe it was just the extra miles we added on both end due to the landslide, but neither of us misses that hike too much, beautiful as it was! In that respect, we can’t honestly recommend it, but perhaps people in better condition than us would be more interested in it!
In any case, after getting back to our car at the visitor center, we were ready to be off our feet and to get some food in our protesting bellies. We stopped at the first town we drove through, and our spirits soared when Dagmar excitedly called out that she had spotted a place called the Food Garage. That kind of name suggested just the sort of face-stuffing hedonism we needed to recoup our strength, and we almost sprinted from the car to the restaurant.
As we approached, we saw that the restaurant sign we had in our delirium wishfully read as “The Food Garage” was, in fact, “The Good George.” At that point, however, it could have been named The Goop Garbage and we would have eagerly gobbled down whatever they had to offer, so we went ahead and let ourselves in. The food turned out to be delicious, and we even treated ourselves to some sticky date pudding, which we had fallen in love with all the way back at our first HelpX when our Master Chef host had made us an absolutely delicious sample.
Finally getting our batteries recharged, we continued on to our next stop, which we will tell you all about in our next entry! Thanks as always for reading. If you’d like to leave a comment, maybe you can talk about something famous you visited which didn’t end up being as exciting as it was cracked up to be!