The Coromandel

Having completed the rather exhausting Pinnacles Walk, we continued our journey which was slowly taking us back to Auckland. Rather than going straight there, however, we took some time to explore the Coromandel, the large peninsula east of Auckland and home to some of the North Island’s more interesting landmarks. In order to expore the peninsula, we looped around to spend several days in…

Hikuai

Refreshing our memory on Hikuai, we had to laugh when reading the description on Wikipedia, which includes the following statements: “It is prone to heavy precipitation and floods…which occasionally causes impassibility. The cellphone and electricity coverage is patchy but is intact.” As luck would have it, we confronted both of those issues in a very real way during our time there!

As far as the cellphone coverage is concerned, despite our meticulously written directions, we spent a good twenty minutes in a lonely gas station parking lot struggling to get even a single bar of service to help us find our AirBnB. After failing to do so and accidentally trespassing around one secluded farmhouse we eventually realized was not our AirBnB, we decided to revisit a road which we had originally abandoned as a possibility: the mailboxes didn’t match the description given on AirBnB, and the “driveway” was only that by the most generous definition–more accurately, it was a gravel road which stretched at least a half a mile before bending out of sight. We had gone partway down it when we first arrived, but after a couple of minutes lumbering and bumping along, our fear of a flat tire overwhelmed our confidence that we’d chosen the right place.

With dusk aaproaching and out of other options, we gritted our teeth and tried it again. We drove past the house it led to which clearly didn’t match the photos we had seen online, and seemingly through its backyard to keep following the gravel road, all the while waiting for an enraged farmer to run out and start peppering us with buckshot. After pressing through the yard and our fears, we followed a windy trail up a steep hill, and finally spotted what turned out to be our AirBnB! It was such a relief to find out we wouldn’t be sleeping in our car (…or with the fishes).

The place ended up being our base for the next few days. During that time, our activities around the AirBnB included playing through some Back to the Future video games (Dagmar had recently seen the movies for the first time and these were a fun way to spend downtime) and phoning friends from the US for some couple games (like competing which could list all 50 US states the fastest).

In terms of sight-seeing, we visited the beautiful Cathedral Cove, which typically sells its claim to fame as having appeared in the Chronicles of Narnia…but you’re likely to recognize it as the Windows 10 Lock Screen. At the time of writing, the photos and videos we took there seem to have gone missing, but that Windows 10 photo pretty much sums it up!

We also visited the amazing Hot Water Beach: located above a hot spring, the hot water filters up through the beach sand, allowing you to dig your own personal hot tub with an ocean view. Despite us being there in winter, temperature regulation was easy: too hot, let more ocean water in; too cold, dig deeper to let more spring water in! Simple as it sounds, this was such an incredibly unique experience and by far our favorite part of the Coromandel.

Enjoying our homemade hot tub at Hot Water Beach!

We had also intended to do a hike Mt. Paku, a pretty volcanic peak in the town of Tairua, but we unfortunately had some navigational difficulties and ended up with our car on the wrong side of a narrow inlet…

Not having LBJ’s Amphicar, faced with the prospect of backtracking for 30 minutes, and fairly exhausted from all the traveling we’d been doing, we decided to write off the hike and just spent some time relaxing at the beach instead.

The morning we were set to leave our AirBnB, at around 6am we were both startled awake by an urgent knocking at our door. Our apologetic host told us that it had been pouring rain all night and–unsurprising if you remember the Wikipedia entry from the beginning of htis post–we were in danger of getting trapped by flooding. Still bleary-eyed, we scrambled to dump all our unpacked belongings into the back of our car as the rain beat down on us and got out of there as fast as possible.

And not a moment too soon: the entirety of the long gravel “driveway” we had come up, along with the field surrounding it, was under a good 6 inches or more of water. The host’s truck led the way, and the last couple of yards were particularly harrowing, with water coming all the way up to the bottom of the car. Unfortunately, the video we took of the situation seems to have been lost as well, but we’ll confess that we were so panicked that we barely thought to take a video in the first place and it didn’t turn out to be of any particular quality. Still, it’s a shame it’s gone missing–one of the downsides of waiting almost two years to write these things down! We’ll be sure to post it on here if it ever turns up.

Thankfully, once we made it out of the driveway, the rest of the way was much safer: while the highway itself is prone to getting swamped, we managed to get out of there before it was too late. This article from a couple days later shows the extent to which the place flooded in the end–we certainly dodged a bullet!

Our last stop before Auckland was getting Dagmar’s ring! As you may recall from a previous entry, Dagmar had commissioned a ring from local crafter Courtney Marama several months back. Stefan managed to propose before the ring got finished, but it was finally time to pick it up!

Having told Courtney we’d be driving through the area, she offered to leave the ring sit for us in her mailbox since she would be out for a pregnancy check-up. We arrived at the house, but the ring was missing! There was a brief flash of panic: had someone lifted the ring from this mailbox out in the middle of nowhere? Had we gotten bamboozled and there was never a ring in the first place?

Dagmar cautiously made her way up to the house and no one was around. After some phoning, it turned out that fortunately Courtney’s husband was already on the way home to sort things out and hand over the ring, he had just been delayed. He was incredibly nice and chatted with us for a good 20 minutes about our travels, politics, and how funny it was that we were bundled up and shivering while he stood out in shorts and flip-flops! While it would have been nice to meet Courtney herself, the chat with the husband certainly made for a much closer connection to the hand-made ring than if we had just picked it up from a random jewelry store.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CDQzo8AHFMt/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Ring in/on hand, we made our way to Auckland! There, we would catch our breath for a couple of days before heading up for our final adventure to the tippy top of New Zealand’s Far North. That plus our ‘final thoughts’ will probably take another 3 posts or so–while we’ve certainly missed deadlines in the past, Stefan is now on summer vacation and has no excuse not to write, so we’re hoping to get those written and posted before our wedding in late August!

As always, thank you for reading! If you’d like to leave a comment, how about telling us the story of where you got your own wedding ring from! See you again soon 🙂