After a amazing time in the bay of islands we left yesterday morning heading south for a small town called waihi which is famous for its gold mining. So once we arrived after our long drive and checking into our new place which I must say is a nice little place we went to have a look at the gold mine, it was huge and right in the centre of waihi. We found out that it started off as a small hill on top of the flat ground and you will see from the photos how deep it is now, that's a lot of hard work for the miners back in the day. It was found in 1880 by a old fella called William Nicholl who stumbled across a slim piece of Quartz on top of the hill, started digging and the rest is history he became a very rich man. Out of 90 to 100 tonnes of rock extracted from the mine these days only about 2 and a half table spoons of gold is found so the mine is now closed, they have now moved further north to the caves where 3million dollars a week is made from gold and silver. (Bit of history)

Today we set out to visit a place called coromandel via hot water beach on the east coast. It's called hot water beach not because the sea is hot, it has a natural volcanic hot spring under the sand, you can rent shovels on the beach dig yourself a hole in the sand and it fills up with hot and I mean boiling water it's mental. It's only in certain areas, so you find a hot spot then a cold, dig a channel between the both and they mix leaving it like a nice hot bath that you can just chill in. After that we left the beach and headed up for a place called cathedral cove where they filmed part of the film Narnia. Once we arrived we set off on our hour hike towards the cove with mild rain in the air, by the time we arrived it was pissing down which ruined the photos really but it was still warm. Oh yeah we wasn't clever enough to take a umbrella or our rain jackets which we had in the car and we got absolutely drenched as you can see from the photos lol.

Oh yeah forgot to say kate nearly got us evacuated from our room this morning after setting the fire alarm off in the room trying to cook a bit of toast for breakfast lol