The next morning, we had a hearty breakfast with homemade bread, museli and jams made from the produce Robin grew on her land. She gave us some recommendations on where to go hiking, and told us about a program in New Zealand where people can "woof" their way around the country.
"Woofers" pay for their room and board by working for local farms or lodges for a few hours a day. This allows them to travel cheaply and see more of the local culture. It seems like fun, and if we had a couple of months, we might try it. I would reccomend that anyone who comes over and has the time to give this a try. The people here are nice and the land is beautiful. It wouldn't be a bad place to work for a while.
Robin had suggested that we hike the Coramandel walkway at the tip of the penninsula. That is how we wound up on the Coleville road. This, as Anna explained, was one of three roads forbidden by the rental car company. She also mentioned that it wasn't that bad, which it wasn't. We made it up to Fletcher bay campground in about an hour and a half without incident.
We had left half of our bags behind at the Jacaranda. Robin had cautioned us that one of the biggest problems in New Zealand was theives breaking into hikers' cars while they were gone and stealing valuables. She agreed to hold the stuff we didn't need to camp with until we returned.
We set up camp and got a fire going just as it was getting dark. Since it is winter here, that was at about 6 p.m. We cooked up a decent dinner of canned Irish stew and some diced veggies. We sat around the fire and listened to the waves on the beach for a while before turning in. We had no sooner gotten in the tent when a stiff wind picked up and it started raining.
It wasn't that bad at first, but soon the wind got stronger until we began to worry that our little tent was going to get torn away by the storm. We joked that it couldn't be any worse than the sandstorm in Morocco, but it was pretty gusty. Eventually, we caved and moved into the car where we slept fitfully until morning. Not exactly the serene camping experience we had hoped for, but we were still looking forward to the next day.
After breakfast over the fire, we started out on the walkway. The trail follows the coast for several miles over some fairly rugged terrain. We started out in some cattle pasture with beef cattle staring at us as we walked through the mud as if they had never seen a human before. After about a half hour, we left the pasture for the proper trail. It rose and fell through valleys and scruby forests.
We saw some interesting songbirds along the way, that had really pretty calls, and a lot of traps. It seems that the weasel and possum populations that were introduced in New Zealand several decades ago have gotten out of control and were beginning to wreak havoc on the local environment and bird population. The DOC began a program to reduce their numbers with trapping and hunting. Traps were set up at regular intervals along the trail (for vets reading this, the traps had diphacinone and cyanide in easily accessable locations where dogs and children may be present. Can you belive that? -Anna). For all the signs we saw that the DOC posted, we did not here a squeak or see any possums or weasels while we were walking. Perhaps the program is working. (yeah, and we read in a local paper there was an "unexplained" epidemic of fish die offs and dead dogs showing up in the area. Hmmm..)
We walked for a couple of hours until we reached the main lookout point. So what did we do? We looked...out. Actually we could see for several miles in either direction. The view was great and we spent twenty minutes or so, after a couple of noisy girls squealed at the view and moved on. Then we made our way back to camp.
That night, we had better weather, but it turned cold. There were cold water showers at the campsite that seemed like a good idea after a couple of days around a fire. They felt like the water ran directly off a glacier, but at least we were somewhat clean. We also found out that night that Anna's sleeping bag does not live up to its 20 degree rating. It was above freezing that night, but Anna didn't get any sleep for being cold. We tried to zip our bags together to huddle for warmth, but the zippers didn't fit. She shivered her way through the night, and we tried to warm up over the fire in the morning.
Then we broke camp and made our way back down to Coromandel to pick up our bags and get some advice from Robin on where to go next. We then made our way over the 309 road, which happens to be the second of the three forbidden roads according to the rental car company. The third was Black Jack road that was also nearby; we almost drove up that as well but ran out of time. We stopped at a small path that lead to a Kuari tree grove. These behemoths of the forest are the second largest trees in New Zealand, and have nearly been logged into extinction. They were very tall, and very straight. We could see why logging companies like them so much, but we were both glad to still be able to see and touch them.
After driving on, we ended up at Cathedral cove. A 45 minute walk leads to a beach with a famous arch cut into the cliff by the waves. We saw tons of tree ferns there, which, as Anna explained to me, are the most primative form of tree. For the initial time period the dinosaurs were roaming the earth, tree ferns were the only tree in existence. It was like looking at a living fossil, pretty cool.
Along the walk we stopped off at Stigray Bay, where there are some great views. The water is so clear you can see every stone and peice of reef under the water. It also made the bay a brilliant shade of turquoise that is hard to describe.
Below, you can see the arch of Cathedral cove behind us. The arch is more like a tunnel, that runs for a couple hundred feet. If it is low tide, you can run through to another beach before the next wave comes in. The tide was coming in while we were there, so we couldn´t make it to the second beach. It was still beautiful.
We walked back to our car and made the decision to drive through back to Auckland. We had initially intended on stopping in Thames to do some more hiking, but we decided we wanted to have some extra time to do some laundry (nearly all of our clothes had the distict smell of campfire imbedded in them) and relax a little before our long 11 hour flight to Santiago. It turns out it was a good decision. It took all the following day to get the laundry done because the dryers were lukewarm at best. To make matters worse, the car got towed for parking on the street during rush hour, and Anna got yelled at by a laundry Nazi.
(I must attract power plays by over-zealous cleaning ladies. This woman put the bathroom Nazi to shame. There I am minding my own business, emptying a sleeping bag from a dryer, when water cascades out of the bag onto the floor. A random woman who had been sitting in the corner talking on a cell phone for an hour instantly hangs up and reveals herself as an employee. She berates me for 5 minutes because I got water on the floor, and one time someone else did that and didn't wipe it up. I politely informed her that I am not that person, and had she given me a moment to restart the dryer I would have wiped it up. Then Scott checks in with me and I explain quietly that the dryer appears to be cold and show him the very wet sleeping bag. Before we can even decide whether to switch dryers or turn up the settings, the woman interrupts to say how it's my fault that the bag is wet, since I didn't use the high setting. I patiently try to explain that I didn't use high because of the synthetic fabric which I've seen melt that way. Wrong answer, she then begins to tell me that she knows best because she works there. I smile and nod until she stops.
As Scott and I resume our discussion, she interrupts yet AGAIN to insult me for not using the commercial behemoth super dryer. Perceiving that there was no end to the tirade in sight, I was near the cracking point. I eventually had to tell her that I was quite capable of troubleshooting my own laundry issues, and I thanked her for her advice in order to get the wet laundry out of there. We said we were going to air dry it, but really we snuck back in once she left. I never realized laundry could be such an incendiary topic. Okay, I'm done now. -Anna)
Other than Anna's run-in with the local gestapo, we enjoyed New Zealand a lot, and we would love to come back. We still haven't seen much. We only saw one corner of the North island, and we still have the entire south island to go. Besides, I still haven't gotten a chance to go bungy jumping... - Scott
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