Day 6 started pretty early with Johannas and I having to get up at 8:30 in order to have a little time to eat breakfast before our 1hr+ walk to the bus to the town of Whitianga(pronounced fitianga). The ride over to Whitianga was rather exciting because the driver of the “bus”, which was more like a van, felt very comfortable doing higher speeds on the narrow and windy mountain road we were traveling on. He didn’t seem as concerned about the steep drop offs to the side that I was… Either way we made it to Whitianga, or w-town as Johannas calls it, in one piece. We talked to the lady at the town information center about the possibilities for getting to the hot water beach in the are. The way the beach works is that there are hot water springs under the sand on the beach which are exposed during the low tide, so if you bring a shovel you can dig a hole, and the hot-springs fill the hole and you get your own natural spa right on the beach.
This sounded like a really cool place to check out so we were keen to find a way to visit. The only problem was that this beach was a 25 minute car ride from Whitianga, and a long long walk, and the low tides were at 6:30 AM and something like 7:00PM the next day. We realized we couldn’t go that night because it would be dark, so even if we hired bicycles we would be in a bad spot. What we decided to do was to walk a little over half the distance to the town of Hahei where there was supposed to be equally cheap accommodation, and then head out early the next morning to catch the latter part of the low tide window, and then at some point do the Cathedral cove hike which the area is famous for, and to which Hahei is the closest town.
So we started walking, took a little passenger ferry, stopped at a little café for lunch, and found what looked to be a short little nature walk along the cliffs, it wasn’t a terribly long walk but it was a lot of up and down hills in order to make it back to the road, so we tired ourselves out a little before even making a real dent in the long road to Hahei.
Looking out over the Whitianga cove area.
Looking out over to the other cover.
The walk itself was nothing exciting, and in fact was a little depressing when we had the clouds move over and we were getting intermittently sprinkled. After about 45 minutes of walking and seeing we were just about a quarter of the way there (and with the sky getting uglier) we decided to start looking for a hitch (which was suggested by the information lady as a fairly safe alternative to walking). We didn’t get lucky for a long time, and we walked a whole other hour (bringing us to about half-way) before a slightly beat-up white car pulled up and the driver gave us the much appreciated “hop in!” It turned out that the guy was going to some city over a hour to the south, so Hahei was a little out of his way, but he kindly dropped us off outside the general store in the middle of town. From there we got directions to the nearest backpacker lodge from the store owner, and got to the lodge just before a more intense downpour started. We waited out the downpour at reception before heading to our building where we found that we were again, the only ones there. We took a short path to the beach to check it out, but since the sky was clouded over and it was still raining a little it was definitely nothing to look at. We decided it would be better to wait for the next day before attempting the Cathedral cover walk because of the high probability of precipitation, and the hike being over an hour and a half round trip.
Back at the accommodation we hung out for a little in the TV-lounge, talking with a guy from California that had just checked in. For dinner we took advantage of a very nice (well, very nice considering) kitchen set-up to do up some pasta with pesto. It actually came out really well seeing as Johannas is a bit of a pasta aficionado and had brought olive-oil and garlic and some other ingredients to do the pasta up right. We headed to bed a bit early so that we could wake up early enough to make the long walk to the hot water beach before 7:00-7:30 to make the tail end of the low-tide window.
Quick shot of the lodging, there was another bunk on the opposite wall.