I think this will be a short post today. We had a light breakfast in our villa today. The reason for mentioning this will become apparent later.
Headed into town to join our boat as we have a boat trip to the Marine Sanctuary at Cathedral Cove. Now the boat is a lot smaller than I had anticipated around 30’ aluminium hull with a 250HP outboard on the back. With 14 people on board it was quite capable of moving pretty swiftly after we got out of the estuary. Now there were winds gusting up to 35MPH and the water was pretty choppy so the ride was, well interesting to say the least. Very soon the barf bags were out and a light breakfast looked, in hindsight, a really good idea. We stopped off at a couple of bays on the way including Mercury bay where Captain Cook moored to observe the transit of Mercury across the sun in 1769 which made it possible to determine the latitude and longitude of New Zealand. The rock here is all volcanic and quite soft so weathers into fantastic patterns called honeycomb weathering and creates arches through the cliffs. No pictures through the glass bottom as I forgot my phone and you really need to get the lens right on the glass or you get loads of reflections. To be honest though there were only 2-3 types of fish and it was a bit of a disappointment.
Some sea kayakers at Cathedral Cove. The nearest place to launch is 3 hours away so they have had quite a journey and need to paddle back as well.
We learned one really interesting fact on the trip. The resident population of Whitianga (by the way pronounced Fitianga) is 4000 but during summer that increases to 40,000. Now that explains all of the unoccupied houses we see and in fact the place where we are staying. They all belong to people who do not live here and only use them as a vacation home. For the rest of the year they are rented out to tourists like us. We thought we had an issue with second homes in the UK, nothing compared to this.
We headed back to the villa as we wanted to do some washing while we had the chance and I wanted to start my trip scrapbook but the sea air seemed to have made me really sleepy and I dropped off for a couple of hours, however I did get the scrap book up to date when I woke up
Headed into town to find somewhere to eat only to find that the majority of restaurants are shut on a Monday. Found a place that looked OK and had space only to find that they were fully booked but we could have a “high” table. We said yes and again really glad we did. The menu was sort of Asian tapas and it was very good. It was nice for once to have a meal which was noticeably lacking in carbs and contained green stuff.
Off to Aukland tomorrow so sorting out suitcases ready to get going first thing. TTFN
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