After a lazy morning, we headed for the Coromandel Peninsula, which is east of Auckland and extends north, into the Pacific Ocean. It's a time machine. The further up the peninsula you travel, the further back in time you go. At the end of it, so Brunnen-G tells us, by Great Barrier Island, there is a community living 150 years in the past. They recently discovered electricity, but they still send mail via carrier pigeons. The pigeons take messages back and forth from Auckland, where letters then merge into conventional modes of transport.

Fires

A sign said, "Light NO Fires." We thought it was funny.

Tables

Lunch was convenience store pies, if I remember correctly. We ate it on a "barbecue table" on the coast. The term "picnic table" is used there also.

Oystercatchers

We took the coast road on the way to Coromandel, which is the scenic route, but takes 2.5 hours compared to the 1.5 hours that the main road takes. But it's so beautiful. The road was often no more than a few yards (meters!) from the water. Sometimes the view was unobstructed, and sometimes there was only a solitary line of trees, which, with the blue showing through the green, was just as beautiful. The coast is jagged; there were a lot of little bays pretty much the whole way, so along with the views of endless ocean, there were ledges of greenery-topped rock jutting out from the sides.

Just before we crossed a bridge and ended up on the peninsula itself, we stopped at a beach that is a popular birding spot. The mountains on the Coromandel were visible in the hazy distance across the water, running along almost the whole horizon, giving the impression we were at a really large lake instead of an ocean. On the beach, there were THOUSANDS of oystercatchers, which are these black and white birds that hang out on the beach at high tide and poke around in the mud flats for food at low tide. Obviously Leen and I had to stir them up, so I got out the video camera while Leen ran after them. The sky was FLOODED with these birds, all flying around in swarms. At one point Leen was in the center of a complete ring of them, all flying counterclockwise around her, while other smaller flocks of them hunted around for a more peaceful patch of beach just a bit further on.

Chocolate Afghans

Dave bought some cookies (biscuits!) called "chocolate afghans," and they were pretty bad.

Coromandel Town

The town of Coromandel, located, ironically enough, part way up the Coromandel Peninsula, is a great little tiny town. It has a proper main street, with houses and small shops, and that's about it. There certainly weren't any big commercial institutions or restaurant chains. There was a takeaway place, a cafe, a couple of tourist shops, and a smattering of similarly low-key businesses. Our favorite was the one labeled, "E-mail and Bead Shop." That pretty much sums up the nature of the place, although I was surprised anybody there had Internet access.

The wharf was the best. It's built in a very shallow area. Boats can only get in or out at high tide. At low tide, moored boats are perched on mud. Brunnen-G told us about how she and her father used to sail into Coromandel. They'd have to come in at high tide, then race into town to do what they wanted to do and race out again, because if the tide went out in the meantime, they'd be stuck for hours.

The House

We stayed one night on the Coromandel Peninsula, and our accommodations put the palace of a hotel in Rotorua to shame. It was a proper house, with a front and back yard, with an unobstructured ocean view. The ocean was across the little coastal road, and there was nothing between that and the water. Inside, on the downstairs floor, there was a large living area, a bedroom, a kitchen, a toilet room AND a bathroom, and a little laundry area. Upstairs are two bedrooms with a balcony accessible from either. Beds and sofas were EVERYWHERE. Twelve people could sleep in that house before anybody'd have to sleep on the floor. The total cost was NZ $60 per night, which is a bit less than U.S. $30.

In America, $30 is sometimes enough to rent an unsheltered portion of pavement in somebody's driveway.

That Evening

That evening we threw knucklebones around the room. Knucklebones are sort of like jacks, except there isn't any ball and there aren't any jacks. The game is to throw a knucklebone up and catch it on the back of your hand, then fling that one up, pick up a second, and catch both in your palm. Then you throw those up, catch both on the back of your hand, then fling those up, pick up a third, and catch all three. And so on. After lots of practice, I made it up to one.

Afterward, Dave played with blocks, built tall towers, and knocked them down again.

We were lulled to sleep that night by the sound of the ocean rushing up against the beach.

Birds

4 new, 17 total: Blackbird, Song Thrush, Spur-Winged Plover, Pied Oystercatcher (LOTS!), Pied Stilt, New Zealand Kingfisher (*), Weka (*)(!), Wild Turkey, White-Faced Heron, Australasian Harrier, Red-Billed Gull, House Sparrow, Welcome Swallow, New Zealand Dotterel (*)(!), Bar-tailed Godwit (*), Black-Billed Gull, Whimbrel, Variable Oystercatcher.

Wekas are common birds but only tend to appear in a scattered few places in New Zealand; the (!) next to this bird is not because it's uncommon everywhere but because we spotted it outside of its usual range.