Since breakfast opens at 8:00 on Saturdays me and Johannas had to make sure we were standing at the door at 8, and then eat fast, in order to make the 20 minute walk to the ferries and still be the required 30 minutes early for departure. I was really not looking forward to this ferry ride. I was still very physically tired from the hiking and biking of the previous week, and still a little mentally drained from the ferry ride the night before, so the concept of another ferry ride was disheartening. Luckily however the ferry I took was a totally different class from the one that runs to Great Barrier. The one I took to Coromandel was probably twice as fast, and was like skimming on the water instead of ploughing through it. I don’t know what they means in terms of the boat, but the ride was a heck of a lot smoother, which was great because it allowed me to be comfortable and enjoy the ride a bit.
The ferry ride was a good deal shorter then the one to GBI, at just under two hours, but it still gave us plenty of time to check out the sights. Unfortunately we didn’t get any sea life this time around to Johannas’ great disappointment.
Auckland receding into the distance.
Smallest island I saw.
Random coastline shot.
When we landed we had to take a 10 minute bus ride to the actual town of Coromandel. We walked from there to the information center to figure out exactly where to go to get to the accommodation we had booked. The directions were simple enough, about 6-7km up the road. So we got a nice little hour or so long walk to our accommodation.
It was a pretty nice day for a walk.
Our accommodation.
Johannas looking at his maps.
As I was beginning to understand is the pattern during the winter months, there was almost no one else at the accommodation. Me and Johannas were the only ones in our entire building, which was nice because we therefore got an entire lounge to ourselves. We decided to follow up on a tip from the receptionist of the accommodation to follow the coastline down to a little nature walk, and then keep following the coastline down to the town of Coromandel for dinner.
We talked with a women who was throwing a ball for her dogs on the beach. This little female springer reminded me a lot of Breeze
After about an hour and 15 minutes we made it to Coromandel, and we ate dinner at a little fish and chips place. Not my favorite thing in the world but it’s pretty big here in NZ so I guess it was good to give it a shot. We didn’t stick around in Coromandel too much because I realized that the sun was setting and since the beach faced west, we might well be in for a really cool sunset…
I thought it was pretty cool anyway.
When we got back I actually got a chance to try and help Johannas with one of his homework assignments. He’s currently taking post-grad level computer science classes and one of his assignments was to write a program to play this relatively simple game called hex. I was able to use some of my chess skills to help him look at some different ways of approaching the problem, and beat him a few times at it as well, not that that helped him I’m sure.