We had a great few days in Whitianga, a town on the Coromandel peninsula. One highlight was visiting Cathedral Cove, a place featured in the Chronicles of Narnia, Prince Caspian! After a leisurely hike down to the cove, I was initially disappointed…the place was beautiful no doubt, but something wasn't right, it wasn't like all the pictures. Then we discovered that in order to get to the most photographed area of the cove, you had to walk through a rock archway. Moms should stop reading here and proceed to the next paragraph :D …The archway is roped off with a state warning that this is a known rock fall risk area. I was hesitant to say the least, but you can't come 1000's of miles over the ocean, 100's of kilometers over land, then hike down to the cove and NOT see the best part! So we, along with everyone else on the beach, walked briskly through the arch.The pictures we got were totally worth it!

After visiting one movie locale, we decided to spend some time with the most famous of all New Zealand movies…Lord of the Rings! It's a bit of a backpacker tradition to watch the trilogy during your travels. We'd heard the first one is for some reason hard to find in the hostels, so when we saw it on the shelf here we didn't waste any time in snapping it up. We've already seen snippets of the other two movies in various hostel lounges, but intend to finish them up properly during the next few weeks of our stay.

To finish off our time in Coromandel, we stuffed a few other backpackers into our car and went for a nice soak at Hot Water Beach. That's right, a beach with HOT water! (Good thing too, because with the chilling temperatures we've had, there's no other way I'd be getting wet!) The beach sits atop a thermal hotspot, so at low tide you can dig a hole and find steaming hot water. The phenomenon is no secret so the area was quite crowded. Initially we had a hard time finding a good spot, so some locals took pity on us and invited us to share their pool. Good people, good scenery, good hot water…life is good!