From West Coast to East Coast — Lisa's (& Steve's) Travels

We only spent one night near the glow worm caves, because there were so many other things to see while moving on. Our goal for the end of the day was a small town on the east coast - Whangamata. But first, I wanted to check out a little known Hot Water Beach in Kawhia on the west coast. Of course a waterfall along the way merited a stop - Marokopa Falls -

This was probably the fullest fall we saw throughout our travels! All the others were fairly thin because we’re into autumn here, after a dry summer. For scale for this fall, look at the fern trees; they’re at least 6-10 feet high. This fall is 115 ft high -

The next pictures aren’t too exciting, but they illustrate something we saw all over NZ.

The rows you see in the hillside are not manmade or have anything to do with the boulders scattered there. They are caused by tracks taken by grazing animals (usually sheep, but also cows) over many decades. A lot of the time, they were covered in bright green grass -

Now on to the hot water beach -

There are areas on both coasts of the country that have hot springs relatively close to the surface. The famous Hot Water Beach on the east coast sees hundreds of thousands of visitors each year, so when I heard about the “little known” one on the west coast, I knew we had to visit it. You can only access the hot area of the beach at low tide, and our visit corresponded to that very well.

That family had already dug a nice sized pool for them to sit in. We tried to find a warm area for ourselves, but the hot springs must be pretty narrow, because we never found an area we could use. We did notice as we dug, the water in the depression had globules of oil floating on top. So we decided we were content with wandering a bit…