2006/05 NZ trip - Road to Hahei |
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Sunday May 21st
We awoke to bright sunshine and a light breeze. It would have been a far better day for visiting the island, but this was to be a driving day for us. We took the motorway across Auckland, and then headed east on the Pacific Coast Highway to take the seaside route. We passed the village of Alfriston, probably a bit newer than the one in Sussex, but we could see the similarity. The coastal hills were about the same height as the South Downs, and the valley was flat and green with neat little hedgerows around its fields. The palm trees didn’t look right and there was no “Long Man of Wilmington” etched into the hillside but everything else matched.
The coastal area is all part of the Harauki Gulf, but each little piece has its own name. We stopped for tea on Kawkawa Bay and for lunch on the beach overlooking the Firth of Thames, an odd name as it looked nothing like the Thames Estuary with the mountains of the Coromandel Peninsula on the other side of the water.
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Kawkawa Bay (4.51) |  |
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The beach was hosting a convention of oyster catchers, hundreds and hundreds of them. The rocks out in the bay were full of white-fronted cormorants, and the shallows had dozing ducks. The swans we saw were mainly black (imported from Australia) but there was the occasional white one (imported from Europe). None of these birds seemed to be eating, more like lazing on a sunny Sunday afternoon. However, we could see showers moving through the mountains opposite, so the sunshine wasn’t going to last.
We were headed for Hahei on the opposite side of the peninsula, but we’d made good time and I thought we could drive all the way round the Coromandel peninsula before dark. That was before we’d seen the road! It hugs the beach at the bottom of the mountainside, so it’s a long sequence of narrow, tight bends, mostly flat, but occasionally climbing up and over a headland. It’s obviously a favourite Sunday drive for Aucklanders, as most of the traffic was snazzy sports cars and ear’oling motorcycles. They were all going faster than us, but I still managed to empty the campervan’s cupboards on the tighter bends.
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Some of the views were just gorgeous, green mountains dropping down to more green islands set in a blue sea. We’d hoped for more views while crossing the mountains, but we met the rain at Coromandel and it stayed with us for most of our drive down the other side through Whitianga to Hahei.
I’d hoped for a faster trip, but hadn’t noticed that there’s no bridge or car ferry across Whitianga Harbour, so it was dark and wet by the time we drove around the harbour and found Hahei and its campground.
Monday May 22nd
A quick exploration of the beach in the morning showed a spectacular coastline with great headlands, a sandy beach, and a bay full of sea stacks. It had to be a quick exploration as there was a big ugly cloud headed our way and it dumped on us for about an hour.