Adventures Around the Coromandel Peninsula

So this Saturday, I finally had a buddy to go out with me! We started off by exploring the Thames' Farmers Market which is every Saturday. There are a ton of cafe's down on the main street, so we walked through the market, found a nice little cafe to try, and got coffee and a bagel. It was very good! The farmers market was a usual farmers market with people in the town selling their veggies, fruits, breads, and crafts. It was neat seeing some of the things people did. We also got to watch an old car parade (to celebrate the end of Heritage Week) that was happening down on the main road.

Once we got back, we had planned on just going for a walk and lounging around until later in the night, but when we got back from the market, Petro asked us if we would like to take a drive to Coromandel Town. Shaina and I thought why not since we wanted to explore! If you look on the map, we drove from Thames along the coast to Coromandel Town. The drive was awesome because it was a narrow road between the Firth of Thames (or the Ocean) and some hills. As we were driving there, we passed a mussel farm so we got to see all of the boats parked out by the mussel ships. Apparently the side of the peninsula that we are on is the side people go to for fishing, and the other side is where people go to swim because the beaches are nicer (as pictured below). Mussels are a huge business in that area, so all of the restaurants sell fresh mussel (and some oysters since we passed a place where they get them from the ocean as well). We don't get sea food quite that fresh in MN!

Petro made sure to pull off and let us look around and explain things about the cities we went through!

This was on the way up to Coromandel. We had to go up a hill (or to me a mountain), so we saw some amazing scenery.

This is a little bit further up again. On one side you can see the water, and across the water is about where Auckland is. Then on the other side, there are just a ton of hills. It was really beautiful. I have rarely seen those kinds of views in my life so far.

Here are the hills that are on the other side when facing away from the water. These hills actually seem like hills to me and not mountains, but apparently everything on this peninsula is considered a hill (or range) but not a mountain.

Once we got to Coromandel, we did some shopping around. The city was smaller than Thames, so we went to the main street that had a couple blocks worth of shops and looked around. The only thing Shaina and I bought was ice cream. I got banana berry which basically tasted like banana laffy taffy with boysenberries. It was AMAZING! So far Gary's statement about New Zealand having good ice cream is spot on (granted I don't think I've ever had bad ice cream in the US either).

This picture is from Google which is why there are no people outside, but I just wanted to show you what it looked like. It's a usual small town with some cool little shops and A LOT of cafes. You can buy "take away" coffee at almost any restaurant you pass. Kiwis here love their coffee!

This is Coromandel Town from the top of hill that we drove up.
You can mostly see all of the houses and the main street.

Rather than taking the same way back to Thames, we decided to drive all the way around the peninsula. You can go back to the map on top if you want to look at the route. To start the drive back, we had to drive over a large hill (which some people call a mountain). It was a really cool drive because it was very windy with the rocky part on one side and many trees and essentially a drop off on the other. I've seen roads like that in the movies, but we never experience anything like that in MN.

We made it to the top! They have a nice place where you can walk to go take a scenic picture (which we obviously did!) The islands in the background are mostly used for farming and don't really have people living on them.

Here is the other side. You can just see hills and hills and hills. It's very beautiful. I can't wait until it turns green!

Obviously when we made it to the top, we had to go back down the hill. We drove around the point and the first place we stopped was Matarangi. It was basically a little community where people go on their holiday. There are a lot of houses within it, but Petro said people buy the houses to stay there on holiday and don't live there the whole year. It's pretty nice inside and there is a little shopping center that has the essentials (including takeaway coffee of course!) This side of the peninsula has really nice beaches where a lot of people go to do their surfing and swimming, so it would make sense for people to go to this place if they live in the cities or on the other side of the peninsula where we are. Then we kept heading south along the main road and drove through Whitianga and looked at some more beaches and then drove past Hahei. Although we didn't go exactly through Hahei and see the hot water springs (you have to drive out off the main road to get to them) we still just drove past it and are considering heading to those on a weekend if we get the chance. We drove through Tairua which is just another town in the peninsula that is similar to the others.

Here are some of the hills we drove through to get back to Thames. If you can see the hill that has the three points on it, they are called the Pinnacles. These are one of the top places to go tramping if you come to New Zealand. Apparently there is a great view. It's about a 3 hour hike one way, and there is a hut you can stay in overnight if you wish, but you have to provide all of your own cooking utensils and sleeping stuff. If you want you can just walk the three hours there, rest, and then walk the three hours back. I think that is me and Shaina's plan next weekend!

We took a mini detour to go drive through Pauanui. This was similar to Matarangi except for some people live there all year long. Many people in Thames have a place in this city to go to on holiday because there is a nice beach area. The shopping center here is bigger than the one in Matarangi, but it still doesn't have as many stores as an actual city. The area around Pauanui and within it is very flat, so a lot of people do there biking around it.

This is the beach at Pauanui. It was starting to get pretty cloudy, but it was still a really nice day out. You can see why people come here to surf and swim. The waves weren't crazy big, but they were still big enough for some entertainment! 

This was our last stop until we got back to Thames. Our entire adventure probably took us a total of 7 hours. That's including about an hour and a half-ish drive to Coromandel Town, an hour and a half shopping in the town, and then like four hours on the way back. We stopped MANY times to take pictures and to just get out to look at the views and stretch our legs, plus Petro took many side roads to show us little areas around the peninsula, so it normally wouldn't take someone that long to get around the peninsula. It was really cool seeing how the different sides of the peninsula were similar and different at the same time. If we get the chance, we would like to venture over to the other side and possibly go to the hot springs. It was awesome of Petro to take us on this tour because it is definitely something I wasn't thinking we were going to do. Definitely a fun way to spend a Saturday!