New Zealand: Waikato and Bay of Plenty Regions

Hello and welcome to the second chapter of the New Zealand adventure! In this article I’ll be walking you step by step through our second week in New Zealand, which takes place in the Waikato and Bay of Plenty Regions on the North Island. If you haven’t already, go back two articles using the arrows on the bottom of the page to the “Arriving in New Zealand” and “New Zealand: Auckland and Northland Regions” articles. The first article goes over the conception of the trip and the arrival and then the second article goes over our first week in the Auckland and Northland Region of New Zealand. Now lets dive in to the second week!

In the last article we left off just having stayed a night at the Whangateau Holiday Park, just north of Auckland, where we got to shower and live in “luxury” for a night. The next morning we made our way down to the Coromandel Peninsula for some hiking and beautiful views on the coast. We had planned on staying in one of the parks right outside of Thames but because they had had some water damage throughout the park, a lot of the trails and campgrounds were closed. Instead we found another DOC campground on the other side closer to where we also had decided to adventure. The campground is called Broken Hills where an old gold mining industry and town use to be.

The next morning we decided to venture out and and discovered the Hot Water Beach using the trusty guide our friends had lent us. The beach lies on top of a geothermal hot spot. When you dig a hole, the water that rises into the hole is hot, and so you can sit in it and use it as a hot tub. As you sit in the “hot tub” you gaze out over the ocean with a nice breeze caressing your face. It was one of the best moments on our trip. Below is an image of Jay and I all sandy after soaking for a few hours.

The following day we made our way a bit more north to Hahei and went to Cathedral Cove. Here there are a few trails that go through rolling hills and rocky plateaus down to the beach. We took one of the trails down to the beach and low and behold we came out onto a beautiful view of rocky cliffs and formations that eroded out of the cliffs.

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The following night we made our way to a Holiday park and cleaned up a bit and had a carnivorous dinner for the first time since Whangateau Holiday Park since we chose not to try keeping meat in the cooler because it took up to much of the coolness and went bad obviously quicker than the shelf stable foods. Funny enough I had never realized that eggs didn’t need to be refrigerated. Apparently it’s mainly a U.S. thing and they seemed to last quite well on the dashboard of the back of the car as long as we weren’t in direct sun. The next morning we made our way down to my second favorite location of the trip: Rotorua. Before we arrived in Rotorua we stopped at Mount Maunganui where we hiked up this grassy hill like mountain and gazed at a beautiful view over the town and ocean.

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After that we drove down to Rotorua. The area is a hub for all sorts of recreational activities and geothermal pools. We explored a few campgrounds near the area and settled on one next to a lake, mind you so far into the trip it had been WAY too cold to swim at all because as I had said it was the end of winter. The campground had a name that still to this day I believe I pronounce wrong- Rerewhakaaitu DOC Campground- but was such a quaint and secluded spot that we stayed there for four nights, almost to the end of September.

We spent the first full day exploring downtown Rotorua and found a shop that was named after Jay, a Kathmandu shop (Peace Surplus in Flagstaff, AZ now carries them!), and the standard all around outdoor recreation mom & pop shop.   

The second day we experienced one of the highlights of our trip: Wai-O-Tapu. For a fee you can walk around all mineral sorts of pools of different colors. We spent the entire day exploring all the pools and took SO many photos and made a wooden lizard friend. Photos below are the sole property of Jonathan Berkun.

Since we had spent the entire day walking around the pools, we had missed the Lady Geyser show where they chemically ignite a geyser to blow less than a hundred feet from you. We watched this show around 10am so we had much of the day left to do something else fun, and so we went mountain biking. It was my first time but man did I have a blast and still have fond memories of that day rolling over hills and navigating through the forest down switchbacks on the hard-tail bikes we rented.

After that we went back to the campsite and enjoyed another beautiful sunset and ate dinner then played backgammon and read until we fell asleep. That wraps up our second week. Stay tuned for our third week where we make our way down to the Hawkes Bay and Wellington Regions and then in the middle of October make our way across the Cook Strait to the South Island. See you there!