Hot water beach

Next we find ourselves back on the road and in the Coromandel peninsular where we visit Aunty Joy and play on the beach in Waihi, a typical surfer's town. A night with the family and it's further up the road to the hot water beach, which is a fantastic little oddity unique to that spot. People, who know about it, including us, turn up with a shovel and dig an hole in the sand and sit in it. Then, some hot spring water seeps in and fills the hole up like a hot bath. Then, because it's too hot to stay in, you divert a little channel for the sea to spill into and you get this perfect mix of hot and cold spring and salt water thing going on. Another little quirk about it all is that it only happens on a narrow stretch of the beach.

On arrival at the beach, we noticed a rather large number of cars in the nearby car park so decided to leave the spades and have a quick look over the beach first. What we saw might have been heart breaking if for the fact it wasn't such a funny thing to see in it's own right that it would have been worth going to look at anyway. On a beautiful long beach with lovely sand, there was almost no-one to be seen, except for a fifty meter stretch which was just crammed with far too many people, stepping on top of each other and generally standing, unable to move, all holding huge shovels above their heads or by their sides, trying to get a square inch of sand for themselves. There were so many people there, that even the lucky few who had dug a spa for themselves looked pretty miserable because they had feet and spades clonking them on the head or slipping into and breaking their little baths.

We wandered along a bit further, dug a hole, loosely filled it back in with damp sand and wrote on the sand: hot pool, with an arrow and stood to see if we could sucker anyone. But no-one was quite dumb enough so we got bored and left.