New Zealand: Auckland to Coromandel

We’d signed up with Haka Tours for their “North Island Adventure Tour;” scheduled to originate at breakfast at a backpacker’s hostel in Auckland. Early Sunday morning, we Uber-ed from our airport hotel to the hostel.

(There’s no Lyft in NZ, and I had trouble setting up the local rideshare company accounts — Ola, Zoomy, etc. —using a US-based credit card billing address. I avoid Uber when I can, but my choices were limited.)

At breakfast, we did the mutual-introduction thing: Our group was 16 travelers from the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, Russia, China, Portugal, and more. The average age was probably mid 30’s; with a handful of geezers sharply skewing the curve upwards. (I was the oldest in the group. Ulp.)

Our affable tour guide, Hygie, outlined the 7-day road trip:

After breakfast, we piled into a small bus (Hygie was driving) and headed out to the scenic Coromandel peninsula.

You don’t have to go very far out of Auckland to be in deep rural country with winding, hilly roads, one-lane bridges, and very pleasant views.

We stopped for lunch at a small roadside restaurant at the Waiomu Domain campgrounds with nice views across the Firth of Thames; and with a stellar example of a pōhutukawa tree, with its massive, hanging, aerial roots, which extract moisture from the air (Metrosideros excelsa, also called the NZ Christmas Tree because of its red flowers around December).

More Waiomu pix: https://photos.app.goo.gl/yDPGG8Wot9t3dYq68

(And by the way: This would be a good time to state that any errors in the things I describe are entirely my own. I took some notes and over 800 photos along the way, but I may have misheard or misremembered some details. If so, mea culpa.)

After lunch, we headed over sere and scenic hills into Coromandel. One (of many) vistas along the way:

More: https://photos.app.goo.gl/TVp9SvGJmswQXxvY7

The brown landscape is somewhat unusual. NZ is currently (Feb 2020) in major drought, with strict water-use and outdoor-fire restrictions in place across all of the north island, and much of the south. Atypical brown hillsides and low rivers were a constant theme through the trip.

We rode through the dry but beautiful scenery to the town of Coromandel, to and through some small towns on the other side of the peninsula, and finally to a campground where we’d have dinner as a group, and spend the night.

Haka Tours offers a variety of sleeping arrangements, from hostel-style communal bunkrooms to private rooms and cabins; some with private bathrooms. Most of the younger folks on our tour opted for the communal bunk rooms. We opted for a private cabin. 🙂

Cellphone data service is very spotty (and often nonexistent) outside of towns in the NZ countryside, so I wasn’t running continuous GPS tracking, but this is a rough recreation of our first day’s travels:

Coming up: Te Whanganui-A-Hei (Cathedral Cove) Marine Reserve; and Hobbiton.

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