I am in Auckland now eagerly awaiting the arrival of tomorrow morning so I can hoof it over to the US Consulate to add some extra pages to my passport for visa stamps. Apparently, I travel too much and my passport is now completely full. If I can get that done and my plane tickets to Australia purchased, I'll be back on the road again touring around beautiful New Zealand's north island.

 

I just returned from a weekend in the Coromandel region, a handle of a peninsula sticking out from the middle of the north island about an hour's drive from Auckland. Most of the drive around the peninsula consists of windy roads with lots of hairpin turns. I am certainly thankful that I rented a nice little automatic car for this part of the trip because I don't really think that Dolly could have made it.

 

I stayed a night in a town called Whitianga (pronounce the "wh" as an "f") at a place called On the Beach Backpackers. Aside from being bright blue and on the beach (the name's pretty apt, eh?), this place was memorable in that I stayed in the same room as Tipper Gore. How is that, you say? Well, apparently, Sarah Gore was a Researcher-Writer for Let's Go Publications and a fellow Harvard alumna. She came by this place to do an evaluation and liked it so much that her family came to stay a week or two later. So, if you're ever in the area, stay in the room in the front corner, ground floor, overlooking the beach. For 28 bucks a night, you can't beat the price for this vice-presidential suite.

   

On the way back down to Auckland, I made a stop over at Cathedral Cove and the Hot Water Beach. Cathedral Cove is a vaulted rock formation that is exposed during low tide. A 40 minutes walk down a well-maintained path leads you there and the views are really just amazing. After oggling that for a while, I decided I'd better hurry up and head over to Hot Water Beach before the tide started coming up again, since it was also a low tide attraction. Hot Water Beach really does have hot water and for a bonus surprise you get lots and lots of shovel-wielding tourists sitting in self-created hotsprings. I think that there must be a thermal vent really near the surface that gets exposed during low tide and heats up the sand and surrounding water. Patches of sand were literally so hot that I had to quickly jump off of them. I actually had more fun watching the tourists than sitting in the hot water, but that's just me.

 

I also stopped at a Purangi (? if my memory is correct) Winery to sample some local organic wines. This place turned out to have a VERY charismatic occupant and an eclectic mix of wines, spirits, and liquors. After an entire tirade on the fact that he knew I was from Southern California because I called feijoas "pineapple guavas", I managed to squeeze in enough time between his talking to sample the interesting collection. There were nashi, persimmon, feijoa liquors. There were apple, feijoa, and kiwi wines, as well as a rather nice port, some homemade organic whisky, and an excellent lemon gin among others. I am impressed that such a small operation can produce such a variety of items.