Tourist Trail Diversions

The goal of getting “off the tourist trail” is often talked about. While the tourism industry in NZ is well-equipped to handle your traveling needs without inhibiting your adventurous spirit, it is still nice to experience corners of the country without any tour guides or queues! For the sake of Blog4NZ I’ve decided to share a few of my favorite hidden gems that I’ve experienced thus far. I have found it extremely helpful to stay in small backpackers (hostels) where the managers truly know and love their area. I am a BBH member and tend to find smaller, homier respites within this community. Some of my favorite spots were by local recommendation from a hostel owner, and now I will share them with you! To save myself from stressing about ranking each spot over the others, I will present them in the order I experienced them, which happens to be roughly a north-to-south arrangement.

Lonely Bay

Lonly Bay from Shakespear Lookout, Cooks Beach,
Coromandel Peninsula, North Island

While visiting Whitianga, I stayed (with my road-trip friend, Nate) at On the Beach Backpackers. It is actually a YHA backpackers, but we were there before the summer season so it was not very crowded! They have free kayaks to borrow so first thing in the morning we took the manager’s advice and paddled across the harbor and around a point to Lonely Bay. We dismounted the open-top kayaks (however gracefully) and proceeded to spend the rest of the morning on a deserted beach, just the two of us!

A Picture Story... Road Trip!

I know, they are long awaited as I keep talking about all the wonderful things I'm doing in such beautiful places but you have yet to see what I mean! It's difficult to upload pictures with limited internet access, so I have omitted them for the most part so far. But, alas, I am going add some here from the road trip I took with Nate last weekend so you can finally have a taste the beauty I see every day :)

Here is our rental, at a look out along the major road (one lane each direction) that brought us up the Coromandel Peninsula. Looking at a map of the North Island, the Coromandel is the piece of land that sticks up in the middle, East of Auckland.

We arrived at Whitianga and found a backpackers (hostel) on the water where we ended up staying for two nights. Here are some awesome clouds from the beach the first night!

A Quick Summary... [composed 30 October 2010]

These past few days have been a bit of a whirlwind of new experiences. Once again my days have been busy with little time to write, so instead of an extremely long post, I think I will have to summarize in list form. In the past three days I: learned to drive on the left side of the road, enjoyed the best chai latte I have ever had (twice), kayaked to a place called Lonely Bay and enjoyed much of the morning with just two people on the beach (Nate and myself), scampered up an overgrown path to Shakespeare Cliffs (and ran into a couple who had DRIVEN to the top), did cartwheels and handstands in the surf, took LOTS of pictures, visited Stingray Bay and didn't see any, hiked to Cathedral Cove for what Nate has deemed the "quintessential NZ picture" where I did more cartwheels (and headstands) in the surf, climbed numerous rock structures on various beaches, took more pictures, dug a hole at Hot Water Beach to create a personal hot-spring-fed hot tub (okay, so I didn't dig one from scratch, but I helped maintain one somebody else had left), grilled a tasty dinner on a BBQ that took ages to cook, drove on the longest unpaved road I had ever experienced (complete with many one lane bridges), hugged a Kaori tree, ate lunch on the beach, and several other things I'm sure I'm forgetting!