Our next destination (bright and early at 8 a.m. the next morning, ugh) was the Coramandel Peninsula, east of Auckland. We were staying in a YHA in Coramandel Town, and I had high hopes when we arrived that there’d be an internet café where I could update. This was mainly because as we’d driven through the town, I’d noticed a shop called “Cybernet” complete with a sign outside advertising “Internet Access”. When I walked into town and found the shop, however, all I found was a single computer with a sign above it saying, “Internet not yet available”. It’s a start, I suppose.

The place I most wanted to see on the Coramandel was Hot Water Beach, on the opposite side of the Peninsula. This is a beach where, at low tide, cold water mixes with hot spring water from beneath the sand. Low tide next day was at 6 p.m., so we aimed to get there about two hours earlier, when the the springs begin to be uncovered (at high tide they’re completely covered by the sea). I went into the gift shop (naturally, there was a gift shop) when we arrived, to find out the cost of hiring a spade so I could dig my very own hot spa. It was NZ$4, with a $20 deposit, which seemed a bit expensive for something you had to give back when you’d finished with it. So I decided to dig with my hands instead. I walked towards the end of the beach, where a group of people were gathered. They were standing in the shallow water and shuffling their feet in the sand in an odd manner. Some of them were doing a little dance in the water. Hmmm. But never one to refuse to do something just because it looks stupid, I joined in to see what all the fuss was about.

It was a very strange sensation: you could walk into the cold water, dig your feet a little way into the sand (hence the strange shuffling motion) and suddenly the soles of your feet were toasting! In some places it was too hot to stay still, which explained the need to dance around. I found a comfortably warm spot, and looked patronisingly at the new arrivals walking up the beach, no doubt wondering what strange ritual was causing the odd people to shuffle and dance about in the sand. The temperature of the springs is about 69 °C, and according to a woman standing next to me, a boy had managed to cook an egg in the sand last week (I wasn’t sure whether to believe her, though; I thought the minimum temperature needed to cook an egg would be 100 °C, and in any case she was dancing around rather strangely). As the tide went further out, enough of the beach was uncovered that several people started digging their own baths. I would have quite liked to do the same myself, but it was getting a bit late by this stage, so we began the drive back to the hostel.

We arrived back in Coramandel just in time to buy fish and chips - the shop was about to close an hour early so that people could get home in time to watch the All Blacks, who were playing Australia that evening in the World Cup semi-final. We - or at any rate I, rugby not being Germany’s most popular sport - rushed back to the hostel with the food, to watch the game with a group of Kiwi fishermen also staying at the hostel. They’d caught some mussels that day (I’m not sure how you go about catching mussels, but evidently they’d managed to) and very tasty they were too, so I grabbed some and ate them with my fish and chips. Australia won the match quite comprehensively, as it turned out. I was quite pleased, Australia being my second team (after Wales were robbed of a win against England in the quarter-finals) but I was also quite sorry to see the All Blacks go out. Kiwis are passionate about rugby in the same way as many people in Wales, and the fishermen were all very gracious losers who kept telling me how much Australia deserved to win.