Hardboiled Eggs and Hot Elbows

On our long land tour of NZ Rob and I had used eighteen campsites over nearly eight weeks, now with the family we drove to our first of five we would explore with them.

Seabreeze Holiday Park was just inland from the Hot Water Beach on the North east coast of the Coromandel Peninsula and the whole area was recovering from the devastation and drenching it had received from Cyclone Debbie, which had dared to pass into the area south of the usual cyclone track. The road that circles the Peninsula, Highway 25 had recently been closed due to floods and slips and many people had not yet been able to return to their flooded homes.

Alongside the road the fields had transformed into lakes in the low lying areas but the beautiful Kaimai mountain ranges rose as majestic and defiant as ever. We crossed through lush native rainforest to the east coast side as the highway up from Thames on the west side of the peninsula was closed. Fine sandy beaches lay to our right as we travelled north to our destination, following the family in Maui Camper number JMK 905.

I had chosen well with this campsite not because it was nearly empty with it being the end of the season, nor because there was a sweet blue roan goat tethered near us but because there was a bar and brewery on site! Although to be painfully honest I didn’t know this gem was here when I booked. The Hot Water Beer Brewing Company sold very good beer in can shaped glasses, as beer always tastes better from the can they say. A young Englishman was behind the bar and the welcome was warm. Locals came along in the evening to imbibe and enjoy supper. This was clearly one of Coromandel’s best kept secrets.

It was sunny again the next day as we prepared for the hot water pools on the beach. We sussed the tides and were on the beach, rented spade in hand, just before low water and with three hours to play before the rising tide of the day ended the fun.

Not the first to arrive we started digging, most of us by hand, in a space between the folk who were already languishing in the warm water. A couple near us vacated their pool as they had boiled long enough and the lady arose, very pink legs and bum to be rapidly covered with a towel against the cooler air. Soon we were all relaxing in our two pools. The hot water spring at the top of the beach, next to the HOT WATER warning sign, seeped under the sand to the sea and was closer in places to the surface than in others.

At the top end of our adopted pool the sand and water was too hot to touch and as our arms and elbows sank into the sand to support us they soon burned, so we had to pick our comfort zones. All the boys vacated to the cooler pool (!) and us girls heated nicely thinking of cold British Winters and chatting about nothing in particular. The familiar company of family around us was a real treat after nearly a year of absence. And they had come all that way from the other side of the world, I could hardly believe it.

From the pool next to ours a Chinese family collected the dozen eggs that had been hard boiling and I remembered the Chinese couple who had visited me in my B&B home in Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight. The wife asked if she could hard boil some eggs in my kitchen so her husband had something to eat if he awoke hungry in the night.

We saw from our relaxed positions some grown men playing in the heat of their pools with their families and then rushing into the cool sea for a dip. This was nature’s own sauna spa and we were loving it.

We passed our pool on to latecomers as they would barely have time to dig theirs before the rising sea would melt the sand walls and as we wandered back to the vehicles I wondered who had been the first to use the natural facility, Maoris I imagine.

We were on the road to Rotorua the next day to experience one of the things I really wanted the family to see, The Mitai Maori Evening, on their own patch of land just outside the town. But first we stopped off at a mini peninsula just outside Tauranga called Mount Maunganui that Caroline had recommended to us as a lunch stop.

Just like Akaroa, a few miles from Christchurch, St Arnaud in the southern lakes and many other waterside towns throughout NZ and Brighton, Eastbourne and Worthing for example in the UK, Maunganui had had its own Riviera time when lido’s, beach huts and captive performing animals had been part of the nouveau waterside holiday scene. Now replaced with hotels, restaurants and bars, retirement homes, museums to tell the tales, surfing schools and supermarkets the seasiders are here to stay.

There was also a park for the children with spongy soft ground to reassure parents as Henry and Ruby tested their strength and courage on impossible apparatus. Nearby I heard the delicious and familiar sound of a Tui bird and one at a time we held the children up so they could hear and see this friendly individual for themselves with his white ball of feathers at his throat. He was fearless, almost as curious about them as they were of him.

We were safely away from the Coromandel now and hearing weather reports about the approaching Cyclone Cook, for all accounts bigger and more violent than Debbie who passed only a few weeks ago. What is going on we wondered? We came south to escape cyclones and here we are awaiting the second in a month. Zoonie was in safe hands, those of our friend Michelle who had a spare key and knew how to hand pump the bilge from the cockpit and Sharron and Brian at the marina, who also had a key and a petrol powered pump, so no worries there while we enjoyed ourselves.

Unlike its namesake, the curious, caring, cartographer Captain James Cook who mapped much of the coastline and did his own naming of places all over the South Pacific back in the 1770’s, Cyclone Cook was predicted to bounce like a malevolent ball down the east coast of NZ over the coming days, bringing an end to the draught and a boost to dairy farming with fresh grass growth, that at least was a plus point.

Cosy Cottage Campsite was well named for an unexpected reason. On the shore of Rotorua Lake with just a thin strip of ground separating us from the lake edge we pitched on ground warmed by underwater geo thermal activity. A couple of metres from the tent a hot mud pool bubbled and the faint smell of sulphur would be the familiar aroma for the next two days.

In between heavy showers we walked with the children down the path leading to a derelict house on the shore. The rainwater puddles bubbled with gases escaping from underground. “Prickly pear cactus!” Henry announced proudly identifying a healthy specimen that was thriving in the warm wet atmosphere. Numerous pukekos, big long legged chicken like birds with red beaks, moved out of our path as they grazed the warm camp grass.

A very curious tent arrangement stood out amongst the now familiar NZ eccentric taste. It appeared a small camper had been driven in to the tent. See the photo, what do you think? It was lived in by a tall, thin chap who appeared each morning in white shirt, black suit and dark glasses and wandered off through the camp to some mysterious destination. This holiday was certainly broadening the children’s horizons.