Hot Water Beach

We started the day as we did yesterday: down at Kohi Beach, where Jess went for a swim, Ben drank a nice coffee, and then we sat and had breakfast in the beach-side café. Today was the day the adventuring would begin properly... so we bought doughnuts to keep us going!

After breakfast we packed up the van and headed off out of Auckland. The roads got a little more windy and tricky to drive than in the city...

The screenshot is of State Highway 25A, the trunk road from Auckland to the Coromandel Peninsula... a little different from (say) the M62!

Along the way we stopped off at a viewing point, that was the first bit of New Zealand we’ve seen that reminded me of Lord of the Rings...

We drove to Hot Water Beach, which is famous for having a hot spring underneath the beach. If you dig deep enough, you can create a hole that geothermal spring water wells up into - effectively making your own hot tub out of sand!

It sounds like a cracking idea - and I think it would be, off season, and with plenty of time to dig a proper hole so you get more than 2-3cm of water. This is what it looked like for us:

Instead of digging our own hole, we found a nice secluded spot to eat our lunch and enjoy the view.