Cathedral Cove and Hot Water Beach

After our hike to the Pinnacles, we basically just came back and relaxed because we picked up the final person staying with us, Courtney, from the airport on Sunday morning! Courtney grew up in Illinois, but she goes to college in Missouri. Flying to NZ was the first time she had ever been on a plane! I couldn't even imagine flying for my first time ever by myself. I have now been to the city of Auckland four times, however I have not been into the actual city part of it where all the big buildings are. I've mostly just been on the outskirts for Polyfest and the airport, so I look forward to spending some time there eventually! 

We didn't really give Courtney any time to sleep or unpack because Petro wanted to take us to Cathedral Cove and Hot Water Beach while the tide was low, so we couldn't really wait. These are two of the most touristy parts of the Coromandel Peninsula, so we decided to go Sunday since we are pretty booked the next few weekends and Petro wanted to make sure we experienced it! These two spots are located about fifteen minutes apart from each other in Hahei. When we drove around the peninsula the previous weekend, we didn't have time to drive through Hahei since you need to get off the main road, so this was my first time there!

The first place we decided to go was Cathedral Cove. The pictures I have below don't really do it justice, so if I were you, I would maybe look up some pictures online because it is a really neat spot! Of course once we parked we had to walk down to the beach...because that's apparently all people do here is walk (I really don't mind though)...for about twenty minutes. 

This is just one of the views on the way down. We are headed down to the bottom of that edge that you can see.

Cathedral Cove was definitely not what I had expected. Every time I saw a picture of it, I just saw the beg hole in the rock (pictured below), but I had no idea there was a beautiful sandy beach! It was an amazing place to just sit and eat lunch. There were a lot of people there swimming and just lying out tanning, so I can see this area being really busy during holiday. The white, sandy beaches are just like the others we saw on this side of the peninsula when we drove around it last weekend.

This is part of the large sandy beach. There is even more behind me, so I can just picture this place getting packed at times. There is a large rock in the water that people were jumping off of to swim which looked pretty fun. 

I was able to stand in ocean water for the first time in forever! It was so refreshing, but  I didn't have my swim suit to go swimming! 

In this picture, the ocean is to my left, so in the picture above, this "cave" is to my right (or left of the picture). This is the huge hole I kept seeing whenever people talked about Cathedral Cove, so I really did just think that's all there really was to this whole place. You can't really see her face, but the girl in the grey shirt is obviously Courtney.

This picture was taken after walking through this giant hole, so you can see that there are even more people and more sandy areas to sit and hang out. It seemed endless!

 I definitely could have spent an entire day there. If we have a weekend where we have nothing planned (which I highly doubt we will), we plan on going and hanging out here. It was a lovely spot to just hang out and relax. Plus, there are other things to do besides just walk to the beach. You can rent a kayak to the spot (and I think there are other interesting places or just really scenic places around where you can kayak to) and you can also pay for a water taxi if you don't want to walk down. I can see how walking back would be a pain after lying in the sun all day and then just wanting to be home.

Because there were a lot of cars parked there, Petro had to park the car kind of far from the parking lot. However, the place where she parked was under a feijoa tree. These fruits are small, round, and green (I had heard they tried marketing them in the US but it didn't go too well) and they basically taste like sour candy.

What you do is bite it with your teeth in the middle to break the outside, and then spin it in a circle in your mouth to break it in half (the one in the picture was obviously cut with a knife because they never look that pretty when you do it with your mouth) and then you just eat the insides of it! You can usually suck some of it out or scrape it out with your teeth...not the most attractive thing to eat, but you just don't want to eat the outside because that is the really sour part. The inside kind of has the texture of a pear, and it is pretty sweet! I had one my second week here and I became obsessed. Back to Petro parking her car under one of these trees, I was ecstatic because we were able to keep all of the feijoas that had fallen off the tree on the ground. All four of us were on the ground grabbing feijoas. I'm sure it was a pretty comical sight, but it was so worth it because I love them and hadn't had any for awhile. We stocked up and then just washed them when we got back home.

Anyways, after this feijoa festival, we headed over to Hot Water Beach. We were kind of in a hurry because you need to go at low tide.

If you look by where those rocks are, you can see a bunch of people. That's where we were headed.

Basically, where all those people are, there is really hot water that sits under the sand. You essentially go to where you think the water will be hot, dig yourself a hole until you get to the water, and then just sit inside it and be warm. When we showed up, there were already a ton of people, so although we brought our shovels, we just chose a hole that was vacant. You can see why you need it to be low tide because when high tide comes in, the water washes away all the dug up holes and flattens out the sand again. Then people come the next day and do it all over!

You can see all the holes dug up with people just chilling. I actually think the sight is pretty funny with people just sitting in holes. You can even see the steam in some of the spots that are vacant. This water is WAY to hot to be sitting in. Courtney stepped in it to see what it was like and these were her words"Oh this water is cold...oh wait no it's not it's so hot it feels cold!!" and she immediately ran back. I think most of us know that feeling of something being extremely hot that it temporarily feels cold. This is what happened, hence the empty holes. We were told the water stays hot for quite some time, so it is like the never ending hot bath. 

Here's the hole we were standing in. It's not too deep, but deep enough if we just wanted to sit in it. The ocean is right next to these holes as well, so if people wanted, they could go swimming in the ocean and then jump in a hole to get warm.

Here's the three of us in our hole!

It was pretty hot on this day, so it wasn't exactly super refreshing to be standing in hot water, however we were talking to some locals and they said that they love to head there early morning when it's cooler, on cloudy and cool days, or even on days when it may be raining. I would love to experience that because I'm sure that it would feel amazing on a cooler day. Normally, the activities we did could each have taken up an entire day each, however like I said, we may not have had time to do them at all, so Petro just decided she would take us so that we could say we had been there! Plus, if we do have time, we may decide to head there again, but until then, I have many other adventures to look forward to this weekend and the rest of my trip!