Our first NZ jobs! / Coromandel Peninsula

We have jobs! Giigan will become a farm boy who milks cows before the sun rises and Jungle Bunny B will become a Greenpeace bunny convincing people to give up their money in order to save the world. Seriously.

Giigan has actually known about his employment for about a week, but I passed my interview as recently as yesterday. Giigan was quite lucky getting his job and didn’t have to do much to make it happen. As chance would have it, while we were staying in Auckland nearly 2 weeks ago Giigan met an English guy who shared the same dorm as he did. He told Giigan he had been working on a farm in the Rotorua area some time ago and was soon going to visit the host family again. Giigan expressed his interest in farm work, upon which the English bloke promised to ask if they needed a worker and took Giigan’s email address. Well, the owners of the farm emailed Giigan later and told him that they indeed did have a vacancy for one worker starting on October 20th! It was a chance too good to be missed, so soon Giigan will head off to the farm located somewhere between Rotorua and Taupo for a 3 month period. He will have over 300 dairy cows to keep him company :)

This naturally put some pressure on my own job searching. I ended up calling Greenpeace and ask about their street to street and door to door fundraising jobs. It was the same kind of work I’d done for UNICEF back in Helsinki several years ago, so I felt confident as I knew I had what it required. The closest town with vacancies was Tauranga in the Bay of Plenty and I was set up for an interview for yesterday. Tauranga is about 1½ hours north from Rotorua and by the sea, a fairly enjoyable place. The interview went very well and I was offered the job as a door to door fundraiser with the possibility of advancing to team leader due to my maturity and work history. I accepted, which means I’m settling down in Tauranga or one of its small suburbs for the near future as my job starts next Tuesday the 14th.

So, our paths are branched for the next 3 months, but we are still located reasonably close to each other in order to meet up every once in a while on our days off.

But now, let’s travel back in time a couple of weeks.

After returning from our trip through Northland we spent a couple of days in Auckland figuring out what to do next. While doing that we took the chance to have a look at some of the places we hadn’t been to during our first days in the city. On Sunday 28th September the weather was exceptional, so we went for a walk along the waterfront east of downtown. The road took us to Okahu Bay and a bit further to the memorial park of the first prime minister of NZ. From there we had a good view of downtown Auckland. On our way back we stopped at a mini golf course and battled through the 18 holes for an hour or so. This time JBB emerged as the victor.

On a pier in Okahu Bay

The following day went by without any sight-seeing being done. We did, however, decide on an itinerary for the week. We were going to the Coromandel Peninsula and then continue south to the towns of Tauranga and Rotorua. This time we didn’t want any guided bus tours to hold us by the hand, so we purchased FlexiPasses for the national intercity bus network. The FlexiPass is quite an easy way to travel by bus in NZ. As the name implies, it’s flexible. What you do is, you buy time to the pass and each time you travel the travel time is subtracted from your remaining time. The more time you load the pass with on a single purchase, the cheaper it gets. We loaded 50 hours for 500 dollars each, which is about equivalent of student bus ticket prices in Finland. Not a bad deal. Our journey from Auckland to the tip of the Coromandel Peninsula and down all the way to Rotorua has eaten 10 hours from our passes.

On Tuesday 30th September we woke up early in Auckland and got on the bus to Coromandel Town on the west coast of the Coromandel Peninsula. The peninsula is in our opinion even more beautiful than the Bay of Islands in the north, and we think that if you don’t have time to visit both, the Coromandel Peninsula is the better choice. The many beaches and bays and surrounding islands are like from a wonderful dream, the colours vivid and alive. The countryside is an endless stretch of rolling hills alternating between dense forests and meadows where sheep and cattle graze.

We arrived in Coromandel around noon. We stayed at the Tidewater Tourist Park, a few minutes’ walk from the main street through town. The lodge was very cosy and to our delight we discovered that we were the only guests during the first night. That meant we had a 6 person dorm all to ourselves, as well as an OK kitchen and a large comfortable living room with TV and internet access. There was something about our dorm reminding me of a bedroom in a typical Finnish summer cottage. It made at least me sleep pretty well. The best thing with the Tidewater was, however, the fact that they had a sauna!

Upon learning this we first asked if it was a Finnish sauna. To this the lady at the reception said that it was a Swedish sauna, which was a small disappointment. Naturally an inspection was in place. It didn’t take us long to happily be able to correct the lady: it really was a Finnish sauna with rocks you could through water on. Even the heater was a Finnish brand!

It was indescribably relaxing to sit in the heat and sip a cold beer. It felt almost like home and was so good that we repeated the “löylynheitto” the next day as well. We did spot one oddity while sitting in the superheated steam; the construction guys had forgotten to install an air intake, so the sauna was essentially a hot, sealed cube! Consequently, it might have been more of a Swedish sauna with a Finnish heater. Well, we enjoyed it none the less.

The atmosphere in Coromandel was so serene that we pretty much ended up doing nothing while there. Not that there was much to see in the tiny town either. Still, Coromandel is worth a stop if for nothing else, then for the smoked mussels you can have for bargain prices ($3.80/100g) at the Coromandel Smoking Company. They are to die for. They also smoke fish and other seafood, these being excellent as well. And if you bring your own catch there, they will even smoke it for you!

Coromandel Town

On Thursday 2nd October we continued to the east coast of the peninsula to a town called Whitianga (in Maori, the letter combination ‘wh’ is pronounced as an ‘f’, so in this case you’d say Fitianga). Whitianga lies on the shores of Mercury Bay. Once again Captain James Cook is responsible for the name of the place; it was from here he observed the transit of the planet Mercury. Whitianga is also the place where the captain claimed NZ in the name of the King of Great Britain and hoisted the Union Jack on 15th November 1769. He was, however, not the first famous person to come ashore here; it is believed that the Polynesian explorer Kupe left his footprints in these sands as early as AD 800. The place was originally called Te Whitianga a Kupe (the Crossing Place of Kupe). Today the town is considerably livelier and larger than Coromandel, but is still just a small settlement. It is an excellent base for all kinds of marine activities.

We stayed at the On the Beach Backpackers Lodge 10 minutes’ walk from the main street. Pros: nice dorms with an excellent view of the bay. Cons: rental bikes available for the staggering sum of $20 a day. Despite of this we rented bikes and sped away, helmets on heads. The weather was the best in a couple of days and we really wanted to see the two main attractions in the area in sunshine rather than occasional showers.

From Whitianga we took the ferry across the narrow entrance of Whitianga Harbour to what is called Ferry Landing. From there we had a long bicycle trip ahead of us – almost 40 km including the return.

Our first destination was Cathedral Cove, about 12 km from Ferry Landing. Cathedral Cove is famous for its iconic cone-shaped cliff jutting out of the water just off the 200 metre long beach, and the amazing tunnel carved out of the rock wall providing the only passage to the cove from land. The tunnel, or passageway, is called the ‘Arch’ and is V-shaped and very high. It is all naturally formed by the tidal water. Cathedral Cove is probably the most amazing beach we will ever see. If you have seen the movie Narnia – Prince Caspian, you will recognise Cathedral Cove as the beach where the children find themselves when they reappear in Narnia.

Cathedral Cove

From fittingly named Cathedral Cove we continued to Hot Water Beach, located about 7 km from Cathedral Cove. This beach is very special. If you dig a shallow hole in the tidal area of the beach 2 hours on either side of low tide, the hole will fill up with hot water. There are two areas on the beach 20 metres apart where this phenomenon occurs. It is caused by a hot rock of molten lava 2 km below the surface of the Earth. It is a remnant from the times when the Coromandel Peninsula was an active volcanic region and is still up to 170 °C hot. As the ground water seeps down to the rock through fractures in the crust of the Earth, it is warmed in reservoirs of hot water on top of the radiating piece of magma. From there the water rises due to the pressure moving through fractures below the Hot Water Beach until it emerges through the corns of sand. The springs are 64 and 60 °C in temperature and have flow rates of 10-15 litres per minute.

Due to a cold Giigan didn’t feel up to stripping down to swimwear, so it was just me who tested the heat of the hot springs. And hot they were indeed!

Hot Water Beach

There were plenty of other people sitting in the sandy pools, some abandoned by the time we arrived, so I didn’t have to start digging a new hole for myself from scratch. I simply made an existing one a bit deeper and then lay down letting the warmth loosen my weary muscles. It was fantastic. A glass of champagne and a girl on my side would have made it perfect :)

Hot Water Beach was a cool experience that you probably cannot have anywhere else in the world, or at least in NZ. Sadly (in a way) we spent so much time at Cathedral Cove that our hot water soak was a brief one, albeit a rewarding one. For full enjoyment you should arrive an hour before low tide. You can find tidal timetables at the tourist information sites in the area as well as at most lodges. When we left the tide was rising fast and in an hour or so all traces of the temporary human-made holes would have been wiped away by the waves. And at the next low tide the whole process is repeated again as new holes are dug by eager people.

Going to the beaches by bicycle was a full day trip; the sun had just set by the time we got back to our backpacker hostel. We stayed another day in Whitianga, but just took it easy since I too had caught the cold which was bothering Giigan. Our treks for that last day on the Coromandel Peninsula were limited to short walks around the town. On Saturday 4th October we took the bus south to the busiest town in the Bay of Plenty – Tauranga.

MORE PICTURES from our trip through the Coromandel Peninsula are available here.