Tairua

Our destination this weekend was Tairua, a town on the east coast of the Coromandel peninsula, where a colleague of Mike's has a "bach" (summer home/cottage). It is a beautiful, rambling place, halfway up a hillside. We had a wonderful dinner last night, then woke to watch the quarter-finals of the Rugby World Cup. New Zealand was heavily favored to beat France, so naturally they lost. I am not sure there is any country that lives or dies with its sports teams as much as New Zealand does with the All Blacks. Certainly the New Zealanders around us were in shock. I have kinda mixed feelings. This certainly stops the ever-increasing mania around the country. On the other hand, we now have weeks of "what went wrong" as the only topic in the newspaper.



After the game and wandering around Tairua, we went to Hot Water Beach. Here, extremely hot water (created from the volcanic areas around) streams (and steams) out near the ocean. At low tide, you dig a hole in the sand and try to mix ocean water with the hot water to get something that won't scald or freeze you. You can tell where the hot water comes out by the large group of people digging on the beach.

The drive back was uneventful. There is a single-lane bridge on the main route back to Auckland that can have huge backups, but we had no problems. I don't understand why New Zealand peppers their highway system with single-lane bridges (by single-lane, I don't mean one lane each direction: I mean one lane total, either controlled by lights or by complicated right-of-way rules), but there are lot of them about.

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