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Coromandel: Auckland’s Easy Getaway

When we arrived in New Zealand, we hadn’t heard much about the Coromandel Peninsula but the friends we were staying with strongly recommended it as our first adventure and outlined a route for us. Here are the highlights of our five day excursion:

1. Heading to the Coromandel Peninsula
2. The West and Coromandel Town
3. Opoutere: Kayaking and Clam Digging

Part 1: Heading to the Coromandel Peninsula

You know that really uncomfortable scene in romantic comedies where the star is on a blind-date from hell? The one where the character wonders in voice-over just what their friend could possibly have been thinking to set them up with this person? That’s the scene that came into my mind when our hosts recommended the Coromandel to us. “Oh, you’re going to love this place! It’s perfect for you!” They proceeded to describe it as a perfect family vacation destination- exactly what we don’t seek for our vacations.

For a variety of reasons we went anyway, hoping to make the best of it. To our great fortune, they knew us better than we expected and just didn’t describe it in a way that appealed to us. What we found was much more than a family vacation area.

The Coromandel Peninsula is a 2 hour ferry ride, or a 1.5 hour drive from Auckland, and therefore serves as one of the city’s main weekend playgrounds. With a smattering of small towns, a few small twisty roads, dramatic fisherman friendly coastlines and broadly forested and farmed hills, on first impression it reminded us of Half Moon Bay near San Francisco. In just a couple hours you can get away from it all into a beautiful landscape. It’s the kind of place that makes city dwellers dream of chucking it all in and going back to the land.

It’s not too surprising, then, that the vibe of the Coromandel is a sometimes awkward blend of genuine commercial agriculture with back-to-landers and tourism. We didn’t really know what we were going to get at any given moment. One camping host or shopkeeper might be living their dream, while the next seemed to be struggling to adapt to tourism. As we found, though, this somehow allows space for everyone to create their own dream vacation. That is, unless they really were looking forward to a Disneyland experience.
Our trip started with a drive from Hamilton an hour or so South of Auckland, so we drove northwest through Te Aroha then north through Paeroa (somehow missing the giant L&P bottle, entering the peninsula on the Pacific Coast Highway. We were advised to stock up on provisions in Thames as shopping opportunities are scarce deeper into the Coromandel. Since we would be tent camping, we made sure to get enough food and wine for the next three days and nights. Then, as it was lunchtime, we pulled into a seaside park at the end of town and promptly broke into our supplies.

On the road again, we congratulated ourselves for choosing a mid-week day a few weeks before the summer holidays since those small, tight roads would have been no fun with the crowds. Never the less, we were occasionally passed by maniacs who felt compelled to drive at the 100kph maximum regardless of the blind turns, one-way bridges, or one-way bridges on blind turns.

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This article was written on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 and is filed under Destination. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.