After diving and playing with the water slides, we headed for the Coramandel Peninsula, home of the hot water beaches and big Kauri trees. We had to make a pit stop in Auckland at the Apollo place we rented our campavan since our fridge wasn't working and we weren't keen on buying ice the whole trip (actually,the fridge was a big differentiater to why we chose the Hippie Camper over say Wicked Van, Back Packer, Spaceships, or Juicy (yes, there is a huge market for campervans here so lots of companies are in the game!) -- less money on ice means more money for the stuff the ice is keeping cool -- aka, beer :) ). Anyhow, we were sorted out in Apollo within an hour or so, and headed on for the big drive.
By the time we got up the peninsula, we decided to leave the trees for the next morning and book it straight for the beach -- we didn't know the tide times but were up for some chill time anyhow. 2 hours on either side of low tide you can dig a hole on the beach and it will fill with hot water that seeps up through the ground, making your own dirty hot tub :) However, tide was at 10:30pm that day, and we didn't have a shovel so we checked out the beach nonetheless but opted out of the self-made-mud-tub.
When we were walking along the hot water beach (btw, the water isn't hot -- its called that due to the digging your own hole/tub thing) we saw the coolest things right near shore: huge magenta coloured jelly fish. These things were so big and perfectly made they almost looked like plastic toys... except there were tonnes of them. It actually made us a bit scarred to go swimming, even though we were told that they're stingers weren't that dangerous. I managed to snag one that floated up close to shore and captured the pic below.
This was a good sized jelly, but there were certainly larger ones ... with the largest probably being about 18" in diameter. And these things are _thick_. I always thought jellys didn't have a shape of their own and needed water to maintain their shape... but not this variety... these things were solid goo. Another dead one washed up so we were able to poke and prod it. If you walked along the beach for a couple of minutes, you'd likely see 5 or so jellys on average. I think all told, Astrid and I saw about 30 of these bad boys in the couple hours we spent on the beach... very cool hanging out with them indeed.
That night we "free-camped" (basically where you just pull into a field that has little-to-no facilities and sleep the night, for free of course :)) on the coast with a fantastic view. We even had a little fire pit which was a nice reminder of camping back home.
Syd.
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