Hot Water Beach

We left Thursday after school and drove north to the Coromandel Peninsula. It should taken less than three hours, but somehow we didn't get there until after 9. (we left our house at 3!) I guess we did have to wait a while for all the girls to get to our meeting place, and then they stopped for ice cream, and then we stopped for dinner, and then we had to get groceries for the weekend, but still it was a little hard to believe it took so long. When we got to our beach houses, however, the long trip was definitely worth it.

This was the view from our porch. It was less than a five minute walk to be on the beach!

Our fun little beach house for the weekend :)

After a relaxing night watching Tangled, we started the next morning off early with a beautiful morning run/walk on the beach, all the way to the rock on the other side of the bay. Then we were able to just sit on our deck and enjoy the view :)

The purpose of our trip was this beach, Hot Water Beach. It looks just like a normal beach, but there is about a 100 meter area where hot water comes up from under the sand. At low tide, you can dig your own hot tub! At some places the water coming up was even too hot, practically scalding you if you stayed in too long. It was unreal! I guess that there is volcanic activity below this area, and so carbon dioxide comes up and that's why it's so hot. Low tide was 1:52, and we heard that the best time to dig your hot water pots was 2 hours on either side of that. People started staking out their claims early, but we got a nice spot. Some people around us kept making un of all us girls trying to dibs a big circle for us, but we held our ground. Unfortunately, it was kind of windy, and the tide didn’t go very far out. We had quite a hard time actually starting the dig because our walls kept getting washed away. One of the girls started one, and we got it going really well. It was crazy to sit in it and be surrounded by such hot water. It even got TOO hot and we had to abandon it because the water was scalding us. It was crazy! So we went back to our original spot and started digging there again. We got a nice sized hole, and even though it wasn’t reallly hot water, by the end it was nice and warm. It was so relaxing to just sit in it when we finally decided we were done digging. We spent the rest of the day boogie boarding (it was SO much fun because the waves were HUGE!), laying out on the beach, listening to music, eating spaghetti, having M&M slurping contests, playing triangle of death and the couch game, and having so much fun.

This is only a small portion of all the people waiting for the tide to go down so that we could start digging. So many people.

Here is our first pool we made. Unfortunately, we were only able to enjoy it for a little while before it got wayy too hot, and we couldn't even stand to stick our feet in.

Here is our second hot pool. It wasn't nearly as hot as the first one, but it was great because we all fit in, sit, and enjoy. Digging the holes was hard work!!

One of our favorite parts of this second hole was that we dug it right behind one of the bubbling, boiling areas in the sand. You can't see it very well in the picture, but there really was a small area that was boiling because it was so hot. Hard to believe, I know, but it's true! We had the perfect spot to watch people discover this boiling water and it was SO entertaining. Some people discovered it by accidently walking on top of it and their yelps and squeals brought lots of people over to see what all the commotion was about. It was so funny to see everyone's reactions. A few people even tried to hard boil an egg in it! I think it would have worked, but they didn't wait long enough for the tide to go down and the waves kept coming up and washing it away.

James came along as one of the drivers for the trip, and so did another friend of the program, Natalie. She was a lot of fun, and even took us on a little adventure. She took us to see glow worms! It was literally pitch black outside and just a bit scary. She had a head lamp, but that was our only source of light. Oh, and it was raining. And we were all in flip flops, shorts, and t-shirts. Holding onto each other for "protection", and screaming when Natalie turned off the head lamp, we really must have been quite a sight! When we found path, we could see the glow worms, or rather their glowing excrement, all throughout the trees and plants. It was like tiny bright stars all over the forest. So cool!

Saturday morning started off with a beautiful sunrise. It was kind of cloudy, but still amazing. Pictures don't do it justice, but I tried my best to capture the moment.

After checking out of our beach houses, we made our way to Cathedral Cove, one of the filming sites for The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian movie. Unfortunately, they close the path at the end of summer every year, and they closed it early this year! However, we still made it to the two bays right before it--Gemstone Bay and Stingray Bay--and it was still neat to see. The paths were suuuuper muddy though, making it quite an exciting adventure as we slipped and slid all the way up and down the trails. Good thing the views were definitely worth how dirty we got!