We headed to the Coromandel Peninsular in the hope of a relaxing couple of days to catch up on some sleep and not do very much. Our first night was spent on a DoC site near a town called Thames, eating tuna pasta and sheltering from a thunderstorm, both of us with a cold. Perhaps not the start we'd intended so we were therefore pleased to wake up to a clearer day and set off to find Cathedral Cove, which promised a very beautiful beach with an impressive cathedral-like archway worn through the rock. We parked up amid many other hired campervans and walked along the cliff footpaths for about half an hour down to the beach itself. The view over the bay was stunning; sparkling aquamarine sea, little islands dotted around and lots of beautiful sunshine, not a view we'd expected to find in NZ. The archway itself was stunning, huge and appropriately named. There was also a waterfall coming over the cliff top at the other end of the beach which made rainbows in its spray when the wind blew. We had a walk along the costal paths and felt much less coldy than we did the previous night, despite the steep steps up from the beach. We ate a lunch of pies overlooking the bay at Hahei a little way down the coast.

After lunch we drove over the '309' road to Coromandel on the other side of the peninsula. The road seems to have been given the moniker 'legendary' but it wasn't that remarkable. It was just a typically twisty, narrow road and didn't seem that epic after the Pass of Haast and Arthur's Pass. We stopped in the hope of seeing a grove of native kauri trees, one of few remaining as most had been felled for timber years previously, but the footpath was closed so we drove on to Coromandel. This was a nice little village with some interesting shops and nice looking restaurants . We visited the smoke shop where we bought some local smoked mussels and fish to make Cullen Skink for dinner (or should that be Coromandel Skink?).

After driving further up the peninsula in a futile search for a campsite, but which took us past some nice bays, we returned to Coromandel and watched the sunset. We booked into the Tui Lodge for the night (camping in the van, but with full use of the backpacker's kitchen, TV lounge and hot showers etc) which was nice and relaxing. We bedded down for the night with a storm blowing in. A low had centred itself between New Zealand's 2 main islands meaning that the top of the North Island and bottom of the South Island were due some gale force winds during the night. We'd parked next to a hedge for shelter and apart from the wind rocking the van occasionally it wasn't as bad a night as we thought it might be.