Saturday, October 12, 2013

Out of Bay of islands again; Destination: Coromandel peninsula

After a long procedure full of thinking and analyzing, I decided to leave Bay of Islands again. This time alone, as Lola found a job in Paihia and stayed there. I was considering also the option to stay, but the curious part of me was stronger and forced me to get on the road again. As the next destination I chose the beautiful Coromandel Peninsula (more on its beautifulness in the next post) and stopped on several places that I did not visit on the way up (and I'm sure I still missed some notable places even after this second round). To make it easier (for both you and me), I will divide this post into 2 parts:

1) Southern Whangarei coast
As my way up north from Auckland to Whangarei was planned just for one day, the fact that our planet is turning so quickly caused, that I missed several places (beaches) due to darkness then... But as the sun comes up everyday, I had the chance to see them now:

Waipu Cove

Langs beach

Langs beach

Mangawhai heads

2) Piha and Karekare
As I proceeded on my road towards Coromandel quite quickly (I found myself in Auckland at around 1PM), I decided to make one more stop. After a quick research I chose two black-sand surf beaches near Auckland, and I must say I could not choose better (OK, maybe I could, but I will never know.. please don't tell me ;)). 

I visited several black-sand beaches before, but I was totally amazed from the blackness of the black sand on these two beaches :)

Piha - top-down view

Piha - bottom level view

Piha and my face demonstrating that the sun was shining :) I was so happy about that, because just before I got to Piha, it was raining quite heavily and whole coast was lost in one big cloud...

Karekare - huge abandoned beach

Karekare - mysterious piece of wood in the middle of the beach

Karekare - in comparison to Piha, Karekare was a lot bigger and much more empty and abandoned beach. In Piha there were several houses, campsite and even a shop and library right next to the beach, while in Karekare, the only building on the beach was the surf-club, which was closed at the time being... 

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