This weekend, five of the students I came her with and I packed our bags and road tripped to the Coromandel Peninsula. The peninsula is known for their beautiful beaches and scenery and something that all the teachers and people we talked to recommended for us to do before we left.
After school on friday, I took a bus to the juicy rental car place and picked up a van for our road trip! I swung by and picked up the rest of the clan who was waiting at their school. It was nice to see everyone because I do not have much of an opportunity to see the other four students that are placed at swanson school up the road from us. We put all our baggage in the trunk loaded all five of us in the van and we were off! Someone from Swanson school let us stay at their batch (beach house) for the weekend so after about 3 hours of driving and getting stuck in traffic, we finally made it to hahei beach. We watched a bit of the sunset and headed to the batch to cook some dinner.
The next morning we woke up and headed over to hot water beach. It was raining and a bit cold for a day at the beach, but hot water has a unique quality about it. When you dig in the sand, hot water comes running out from the sand creating a hot water pool all around you. The further you dig, the more water gets into the barrier that you create for yourself. There are specific places on the beach where the sand and water are boiling hot and certain places that could be cold. We could dig a hole and the water from the sand could be cold and move a yard away and the water could be boiling hot like a sauna.
We spent all afternoon on the beach sitting in the hot water pools alongside the beach at low tide even as it rained on us. We were surrounded by about 100 or more people on the beach, but it seemed that it didnt matter the weather, or anything else, we were all very content with our afternoons.
After hot water beach we went home and cooked some dinner and enjoyed each others company that night. The next morning we woke up, cooked some breakfast, packed up and cleaned the batch and headed out to cathedral cove. Cathedral cove is a well known track throughout New Zealand and was even part of the filming in one of Narnia movies. We hiked down to the cove and sat amazed at the beauty of the beach around us thinking how we were in paradise.
After we got back to our car, we decided to drive all the way up to the tip of the coromandel peninsula because my host father told me that it was worth the drive for how beautiful it was. What we did not know is that the roads were all gravel and very narrow as we winded our way through the hills and mountains. One of my friends dreams was to pet a sheep so we met a farmer on our drive that let us pet some of his sheep from the sheep farm. Sheep are quite dull and are terrified even sometimes of themselves so it was kind of funny to watch her try and pet the sheep.
When we finally made it to the tip, I drove right into the sand of the beach and managed to get us stuck in the sand so someone had to drag us out. Typical. After spending some time and soaking up the sunset, we drove home and got home to Auckland late at night tired but full from a weekend of american food, laughs, and new memories from paradise.
