We woke this morning to the sound of rain hammering down overhead. We did not have to hurry ourselves, check-out time was 10, and the car hire company was not due to pick us up until 11. There was a nice pool outside the lounge, but it was just as wet beside the pool as in it. So we vacated our room at 10 and spent a pleasant hour sitting in the lounge reading - this is one of many establishments we have visited with a book exchange, so we exchanged what we had read for new ones. Sometimes you can't do an exchange as they don't have one, or their shelves don't have anything you want to read; occasionally, the choice had been between foreign language books, lots of Dan Brown, and a few romantic novels. But often we have been quite lucky.
At 11, we were ready to be collected. At 11.15, Paul rang the rental company, who had probably forgotten. At 11.30 he rang again, and they said the driver was possibly lost! I wasn't surprised, we were close to the airport, but in a rather out-of-the-way place. Anyway, eventually he arrived and we visited the rental office to sign the paperwork, and we were off somewhat later than hoped - through the driving rain.
We had briefly visited the Coromandel Peninsula on our tour, and we wanted a chance to see it in more detail, so we repeated the start of the route we took from Auckland on our tour. The highways weren't particularly memorable, and we couldn't see much of the scenery through the rain. We made a lunch stop at little cafe endearingly called The Pukeko's Nest and then pressed on. We see Pukekos quite a lot. They are apparently a member of the rail family. They are also called the Purple Swamp Hen although they are not really purple at all but, for the most part, a deep almost iridescent indigo blue. The back and wings are black with a greenish gloss. The large scarlet triangular shaped bill and orange-red legs and feet complete a very exotic picture.
We skirted Thames and joined a road the tour hadn't taken, up the west coast of the Coromandel Peninsula. No wonder our tour hadn't gone that way! The road was very narrow, hugging the rocky coast, a series of small headlands.
On the left of the car, the so-called 'shoulder' was frequently only a foot wide, then there was a sharp drop of 6 - 10 feet to a rocky beach. On the right, there was a rocky cliff, and plenty of signboards warning you that the cliff was likely to throw boulders at you! We couldn't imagine the bus managing a road like that!
It really was a beautiful drive, though worrying; there was a lot of traffic coming the other way, and a fair number of them had boats on trailers. I guessed that some people had taken advantage of the beautiful weather on Friday and Saturday to have a sea-side weekend; and when they realised how truly awful the Sunday weather was, they decided to go home. There are some boat trailers which are wider than a car, so we had some anxious moments on the narrow road.
Sometimes there were a few yards of sandy or gravelly beach. If it had been a nice day, I daresay everywhere would have been crowded with bathers and fishermen, but today there were few people stopped in the lay-bys.
At this point, it was only drizzling, so we could stop to take pictures. However, you can see it was quite a dull day, and the headlands just melt away into the mist. We had our last sight of the sea as the road turned away to the east and started to climb.
We twisted and turned our way through a volcanic landscape, with steep sides and sharp peaks and deep wooded valleys. We did keep stopping to take photos, but it was hard because the rain was now so heavy you couldn't see much, and often both cloud and curtains of rain filled the valley. My raincoat is more shower proof than bucket-of-water proof, so I got quite wet whenever I climbed out of the car. The photo below was taken when the rain wasn't quite so heavy, and, if it isn't published too small, nicely shows the steep slopes nibbled to a sort of green corduroy by the sheep and cows.
There's no sign of the sheep and cows, of course; the poor things are standing dejectedly under a tree somewhere wondering, like us, if it will ever stop.
Eventually, we got our first sight of the other coast, again through the mist and driving rain
and we descended towards Coromandel town. While we were searching for the place I had in mind to stay, we saw this historic barge and could not resist stopping for a photo. If we manage to visit the Visitors' Centre tomorrow, we may find out exactly what it was and why it is there.
Eventually, we found the place I was looking for, and were fortunate in securing the last double room with en-suite bathroom; some people who pulled in behind us were not quite quick enough getting out of their car and into reception, and drove away to find somewhere else.
We are fervently hoping for better weather tomorrow, there's a narrow-gauge railway which does one hour trips, but the carriages are relatively open so it wouldn't be pleasant with all this water being thrown at us. At present, it is getting even worse and there is a fierce wind as well, so we are not hopeful.
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