The Coromandel Peninsula

We've been home from our trip to the North Island for 10 days now, but I'm still sorting through photos and deciding which ones to post. After we spent two days in Auckland, we drove about two hours south and east to the Coromandel Peninsula, a mountainous thumb that runs north and south. It's about 60 miles long by 20 miles wide. At the base of the thumb, on the west side, is the town of Thames, where we stopped to get groceries. Dave didn't want me to take this next photo, but I liked the hills in the background and I thought you'd be amused at the familiar foreground.


We drove north along the western coast of the Coromandel. On the other side of the huge bay to west of us we could occasionally see land, which would be the area south of Auckland where Dave had been exploring the day before. To take the next picture, we stopped and looked back the way we had come (so this photo is looking south with the huge bay to the right/east).

As we drove north on the incredibly slow road (a very twisty road that mostly followed the shoreline), the sun went down. The next two photos were taken just before getting to Coromandel Town, which is about two-thirds of the way up the peninsula.

At Coromandel Town we headed east through the hills to the place we were staying, Matarangi Beach. It's a resort community a lot like Sun River, Oregon, with tennis courts, a golf course, and walking paths through the houses. The house that was lent to us was only about 100 yards from the beach. We stayed there five nights, and I loved it there. Every day the weather was rain-sun-rain-sun. Here are some photos of the many moods of the beach near the house we stayed in.

We didn't get many good photos of other parts of the east side of the Coromandel because of the weather. Below are two. We did drive down the whole east side of the peninsula and then further south, along the Bay of Plenty. I'll post some photos of the Bay of Plenty in the next post.