Hot Water Beach

It's just up the road, Brunnen-G told us, so we departed that morning from our $30 palatial estate and drove SEVEN HOURS over to Hot Water Beach, on the east side of the Coromandel peninsula, where, at low tide, you can shovel out a spa pool on the beach and bathe in naturally hot water. Unfortunately we missed the tide, so we didn't get to do that, but we did get to climb around on rocks and go through little caves and stuff, and that was what was important.

Hahei

Hahei, a town on the Coromandel Peninsula north and east of Coromandel, is a comical little rustic town that's grown up in the past few years thanks to tourists attracted to Hot Water Beach and Cathedral Cove. We could see, from an outlook above the water, where Cathedral Cove was, and it wasn't very far away, but seeing it properly required either a boat trip or a one hour hike, so we passed on it.

We ate some nasty food there. We got fish and chips from an ordinary looking place with seating indoors and out. It had free ketchup (tomato sauce!), and we found out why. It was the most disgusting ketchup I have ever tasted in my life. And the fish had uncooked batter in spots.

One interesting difference between the eating habits of Americans vs. the eating habits of Europeans is that Americans don't use silverware nearly as much as Europeans do. We eat french fries with our hands. We eat pizza with our hands. We eat a lot of things with our hands that they don't. So one would expect that New Zealand, much more like Britain than America, would use silverware a lot too, right? In fact, one of the first days we were there, I started naturally eating fries with my hands, and Leen reminded me that it would probably be more polite to use a fork.

Not so. New Zealanders use utensils LESS than Americans. An American, consuming a plate of fish and chips, would use a fork on the fish and fingers on the fries. In New Zealand, I don't think we got silverware ONCE when we got takeaway fish and chips. At this place in Hahei, I couldn't even FIND silverware. Brunnen-G never used any on the fish. In spite of the fact that the batter on the fish is greasy and the fish itself is juicy and falls apart into small pieces on contact, everybody seemed to eat it with their fingers over there. So we did, and that meant afterward I was in dire need of running water, because if there is one thing I can't stand, it's having food grease on my fingers.

So gross ketchup and insufficiently cooked fish were strikes one and two. Strike three was when Darleen ordered a berry flavored smoothie. Here, a smoothie would be a cross between a milkshake and a slush puppy: some kind of sweet, nearly frozen drink with fruit flavoring. What Leen was served was one of the vilest things ever served in a glass. It was essentially drinkable yogurt. It was not only unsweetened, but I highly suspect the fructose was extracted out of the berries before they were used. Leen and I took one sip and recoiled in agony. Brunnen-G tried it and sort of liked it. The Coriolis Effect must do something downright EVIL to people's taste buds down there.

Kauri Trees

More driving on windy roads through rainforests with Jurassic Park-like vegetation brought us to occasional points of interest such as Kauri Trees. We saw a little sign saying, "Square Kauri, 175m," and a little arrow. We figured, ok, 175 meters isn't long, even if there is a bit of a light rain (it was a rain forest, after all -- we got almost no rain the entire trip except when we got these cute little drizzles in the rain forests), so we spilled out of the car and started up the trail.

What we failed to realize was that the 175 meters was due up. After climbing LOTS of cheesy little wooden stairs, including many where the steps were made of vertical boards only (to prevent erosion; dirt and pooled water formed the horizontal parts of the steps), we reached the Square Kauri tree. It wasn't all that square, but one could certainly see how the trunk was angularly shaped. Mature Kauri trees are huge. Nothing like the California Redwoods, but Brunnen-G, who has seen both, assures us the Kauris are no less impressive. Many of them were harvested for timber once upon a time, but now the surviving trees are protected. The Coromandel Peninsula is where a number of them can still be found.

Further down the road, another trail went to a grove of more Kauri trees, including a Siamese Kauri -- two separate Kauri trees that joined at the base. Very impressive.

Oystercatchers, Part II

Driving back along the coast, we found a beach with even more oystercatchers than we saw the day before. There were many thousands of them, huddled so close together that you couldn't see the sand beneath them. And the colony stretched WAY down the beach. Naturally we had to stop. Approaching the beach across the grassy stretch between the parking lot and the sand, we had to go up a small rise, so we couldn't see any of the birds at first. Then it was like a great tracking shot from a horror film. Walk a little closer, and the beach becomes visible, and these many thousands of birds all sort of appear at once, extending so far to the left and right that we couldn't see all of them at the same time. We walked onto the beach, and they all walked out of the way. It was like Moses parting the Red Sea.

We stirred a few of them up and took some great pictures. I tried running at them with the video camera going, but, darn it all, the battery died just before, and I didn't get any of it. Too bad; it would have been a great shot -- birds were flying up in front of me like a giant blanket being lifted off the sand.

On our way back, a guy came over and lectured us about disturbing the birds. "They're resting," he said, "because it's high tide, and they can't swim. At low tide, they walk down into the mud flats to find food. Now they need to rest."

Naturally we all felt very remorseful. I know I'd be exhausted if, twice a day, I had to walk from the high part of the beach all the way down to the low part of the beach.

Actually Brunnen-G did feel a little bad about stirring them up, but we were quick to assure her that the world belongs to people and exists solely for us to amuse ourselves by trampling over at our whim. Then Dave pointed out that we did the birds a favor. Since all they do is walk up and down the beach all day, we reminded them that they could, in fact, fly, thereby strengthening their ability to survive.

If the birds were endangered, of course, I would have seen the guy's point. But I'm not kidding about how many of them there were just on that one beach -- maybe a hundred times how many takahes there are in the world. The colony was so huge we would have tired out and given up before we could have run down the whole beach and made ALL of them fly up a little and settle down again a few yards further away.

Gas Prices

The price of gas in New Zealand is expressed in New Zealand dollars per liter. Doing a head conversion to U.S. dollars per gallon isn't actually as bad as it seems. Cut the number in half, and you get U.S. dollars. Quadruple that, and you get gallons. The prices we were seeing were around NZ $1.019 per liter, which is roughly US $2 per gallon. Expensive. Diesel was around NZ $0.669 per liter, which is a lot better.

The thing was, though, not all the gas prices ended in 9/10ths of a cent. In the U.S., a lot of the gas price signs don't even let you change the 9/10ths part, because it's ALWAYS some dollar amount ending in 9/10ths of a cent. In New Zealand, I saw prices ending in 1/10th, 3/10ths, 5/10ths, and 7/10ths, as well as the most common 9/10ths.

Money

Although this issue isn't particularly related just to this day, now is a good time to talk about New Zealand money. Their smallest coin is the five cent coin, and a lot of people want to get rid of it and make the ten cent coin the lowest. There's a 20 cent coin and a 50 cent coin, both huge silver things. And there's a one dollar coin and a two dollar coin, both gold colored. The smallest bill is a five dollar bill. That sounds like it would be easy to get used to, but it's not. Dave was continually annoyed that his change was worth something. And I found it disconcerting when I paid for something that cost $5.50 with a ten dollar bill and only got coins for change.

Monkey

Monkey is a dubbed Japanese television show based on Chinese legend and produced by the BBC. (Got it?) It is the best/worst television show ever. Brunnen-G has mentioned it on this forum before; well, she got a tape of three episodes mailed to her while we were there, so we got to see this masterpiece of badness. It stars Monkey, a powerful being that once defeated heaven and declared himself equal with it. His companions are other, similar creatures who have fallen from grace and are punished by being forced to walk the earth. Amongst their company is a male Buddhist monk, played be a female...in lipstick. The best episode of the three was about a guy who ate gold -- he'd gnaw pieces off a big nugget for his meals -- and he had a daughter that he wanted to marry off to some guy that he could trust not to usurp his fortune. He tried to get the monk to marry her, which made things more than a little bizarre, and Monkey saved the day by turning into a bee and invoking the power of his magic cottonball cloud, that he rode around on in the skies. The cloud scenes were great. Monkey would suddenly turn into a rigidly posed action figure, fly around the skies on a cottonball, and shoot lasers at things.

The end of every episode has the narrator delivering an inscrutable moral message. Like, paraphrased, "Cleverness is always sure of itself, but wisdom gives up a little certainty every day." At the end of the gold king episode, the gold king was changed into the dirt king. He grew really big -- as big as a mountain -- and then started hacking away at mountains and eating the ground. The narrator said that he spend the rest of his days "clearing mountains and eating dirt...like the rest of us." What!? Wait! What???

After that, we consumed another episode of Thunderbirds and finished off the inferior "Thunderbird 6" movie.

Birds

2 new, 30 total: Song Thrush, Black-Backed Gull, various Shags (Cormorants), Little Black Shag, Red-Billed Gull, Eastern Rosella, New Zealand Kingfisher, Wild Turkey, Pheasant, Yellowhammer (*), Paradise Shelduck, Australian Magpie, White-Fronted Tern, Black-Billed Gull, House Sparrow, Australasian Harrier, Spur-Winged Plover, Myna, Fan Tail, Pied Oystercatcher, Mallard, Welcome Swallow, European Starling, Blackbird, Pukeko, Goldfinch, White-Faced Heron, Wrybill (*), Pied Stilt, Spotted Dove (!!).