Saturday 14 February 2026 – Apropos of nothing at all, today is the 37th anniversary of the day Jane and I got together, when we were young(ish), ambitious and employed. These days? Not so much. More “getting on a bit, retired and travelling while we still can (afford the insurance)”. In those days we were driven; these days we are more likely to be chauffeured to the airport.

Anyhoo…

Today was billed on our itinerary as a full day guided tour: Nature and Coast, provided by an organisation nattily called Kiwi Dundee. We were to be met on the Other Side, which was not a spiritual thing, but a short ride on the shuttle ferry.

This took us to Ferry Landing, whence we could just about see parts of Whitianga through the rain.

On the wharf at Ferry Landing is a representation of a Polynesian Star Compass

which the Māori navigators use in conjunction with memorised positions of stars in the sky so that they can navigate safely and surely.

After a wait of a few minutes, our guide, John, arrived to take us on the tour; alongside us were a nice couple from Upminster called Sue and Peter, who were on their penultimate destination in New Zealand having done pretty much the reverse of our itinerary. John explained about the destinations of the day, starting top left and working clockwise and down.

The first stop was Cook’s Beach, which, to be frank, looks nothing special, particularly not in the rain that began to fall as we visited.

However, the beach is sufficiently significant to be given Cook’s name, because although it wasn’t Cook’s first landing on New Zealand soil (that was at Gisborne, further round on the east coast), it was the site where he had a meaningful welcome meeting with a Māori chief, Te Whiti, involving the exchange of gifts (Cook gave seed potatoes, thus introducing the vegetable to New Zealand). It was also the site where he viewed the transit of Mercury across the sun, hence giving Mercury Bay its name. John explained a great deal of the background of that 1769 date with history. Cook travelled to New Zealand from Tahiti and, in a stroke of genius or possibly dumb luck, brought with him a Tahitian linguist, Tupaia; it transpired that he understood the Māori language, which must have made things a lot easier all round.

John also explained why the transit of Mercury was such a big deal. Cook had arrived explicitly to record it; it was an event that lasts for just two days, so timing was crucial. The location has a memorial statue.

The reason it was important is that Cook, by recording the exact time that Mercury started its transit, could identify the exact longitude of New Zealand. In those days sailors could measure latitude exactly using a sextant, but longitude was guesswork unless one had a sophisticated and expensive gimbal clock on board; HMS Endeavour did not, so the datum was of great importance, and enabled Cook to (eventually) draw a detailed and surprisingly accurate map of New Zealand as he circumnavigated it. There is a copy of that map on an info board on the site.

The lump at the bottom is actually Stewart Island. Cook knew it was an island, but disguised it on his map so that those damn’ Frenchies, who apparently were sniffing round the area for lands to claim, wouldn’t come and have a go there. His accurate placing of New Zealand enabled the guesswork of Abel Tasman, who had placed it near South America, to be corrected. Tasman, a Dutchman, was the first European to have sighted New Zealand, and thus gave it its name, but the locals were hostile and so he didn’t land.

Our next stop was a headland overlooking Hahei beach, which could just about be made out through the rain, which was pissing down by this stage.

Amazingly, people were walking along it, despite the weather. We took a short walk up the headland, called Hereheretaura, which gave us some decent views on those occasions when the clouds cleared momentarily,

and allowed John to explain that the rocks of these cliffs were rhyolite, and relatively junior, being only some 8 million years old. The headland is actually the site of what was once a Māori village, and John showed us where the chief’s house would have been, as well as other key parts of the village.

John’s background is that of a park ranger – he spent some years in the UK doing that work – and as the day wore on, it became clear that he had a great knowledge of the geology, flora and fauna of the area, as well as its history. We passed a New Zealand Flax plant, not to be confused with the plant we know as flax and an important resource for the Māori people, as its seeds could provide food and its leaves could be used for a multitude of purposes. He demonstrated how to get the fibres from it

that could be made into rope or even woven into cloth for items like sails.

Our next stop was Hot Sands Beach, which, honestly, doesn’t look much,

but the car park was full and there were lots of people around, so Something Was Clearly Afoot. In fact, John bade us remove our shoes and socks so that we could walk on the beach, entrance to which was guarded by a stern warning!

We walked along the beach for a while

and it became clear that Something Was, Indeed Afoot, further along.

People were approaching this group bearing shovels

and it soon became clear why. John had timed our arrival to be at low tide, which is the time when it’s easiest to experience the water that wells up through the sand from an underground lake which is heated by volcanic activity some 3km below. We stood in the sand and could feel that warmth – indeed I had to move at one stage because it was too hot to stand still. And the groups of people were making the most of the low tide to construct informal hot tubs.

John showed us something that no-one else was bothering to look at.

This is a lump of ignimbrite, with distinctive marks showing where Māori people (probably young men) had used the rock to sharpen spears.

We headed back to John’s van and, given that by now the main Thing That Was Afoot was sand from the beach, we used the facilities there to rinse our feet before getting back into shoes and socks. Then we headed off for some lunch at Calenso Cafe.

This is a cafe where they grow and use as much of their own produce as they can, and source the rest through local suppliers. We had an excellent lunch there – hot smoked salmon and salad – before moving on to our final location, considerably south, in Puketui Valley, part of the Coromandel Forest Park. The site we visited was called Broken Hills, and it is part of the local history of gold mining. There are some parts of New Zealand where one can pan for gold. The Coromandel Forest Park area is not one of them. There’s gold in the quartz to be found there; but this has to be extracted via a mining operation and the gold extracted via an industrial process. John briefed us about what was once a town on the site that supported several hundred people. You can tell what the weather was doing at this point.

He showed us a photo from 1907 and pointed out where different parts of the operation would have been sited.

The town burned down in 1921, and that was the end of any significant mining activity. But there are still elements of the town to be seen, and that was the route that John led us along. But first we had to clean and disinfect the soles of our shoes

because there are Kauri trees in the area, and it’s important to keep them clear of the pathogens which would otherwise destroy them.

We stopped at the entrance to the mine

or, rather, an entrance – the mine itself operated on several levels both above and below where we stood. You can see the rails on which wagons loaded with extracted quartz rocks could be wheeled away.

We peeked into the mine entrance,

and a couple of things can be noted. On the left is the patron saint of mining, Saint Barbara

and dead ahead you can see the warning about cameras. In fact, this mine is still officially active, in that someone has a licence and pays to maintain his claim. His doing this actually serves to protect the area from any further exploitation, even if he doesn’t (he says) do any mining because (he says) there’s no gold left there.

John took us on to the area where the extracted rock would have been processed.

To the right is where a water wheel would have operated, powering various operations. One of these would be the other construction, which was a series of hammers (a “battery”), used to pound the rock into a powder. The hammers were driven by a cam powered from the water wheel. The powder was then agitated under a flow of water on a grooved slope, which sometimes was anointed with mercury to assist the extraction. The heavier particles (i.e. the ones with gold in them) would fall into the grooves, and the rest would be washed away. The gold-bearing powder was then treated with, for God’ sake, prussic acid (that’s cyanide) to dissolve the gold, which was then extracted by evaporation on to zinc before the zinc was dissolved away in sulphuric acid. All these noxious substances, allied with the toxic silica dust, represented a huge health threat to the workers, but they were well-paid and this pre-dated today’s enlightened health & safety ethos.

One of the reasons John brought us there was to show the power of the forest. The mine, for which considerable logging and clearing would have been undertaken, ceased operation a century ago, and in that time, the forest has reclaimed the area entirely. A huge variety of trees, ferns and mosses have taken over, including the world’s largest moss.

There are tree ferns of various sorts throughout

and the whole place is a vast battleground between trees of different species as they compete for the light. In only 100 years there is not yet much of a forest canopy and the race is on for trees to outgrow their neighbours to become dominant. Here for example, is a group of six Kauri trees, all silently trying to outdo their neighbours as well as a Rimu tree, which is the one least likely to succeed.

The biggest Kauri there (on the left above) is 100 years old and if it wins the battle will continue to grow, slowly, for maybe two thousand years. John demonstrated how thick the trunk will be by that stage;

it will extend from where it is now, on the left, to where John is standing in the picture.

As well as a host of plant info, most of which I have to say I have forgotten, John showed us into a couple of caves. We had to go into the first one in complete darkness – hands on the shoulder of the one in front – in order to see what John wanted to show us; the larvae of fungus gnats. The reason we had to do this in the dark was so that we could see their feeding strategy, which involves attracting prey by glowing.

Not a brilliant picture, but a tribute to the power of a mobile phone to capture some kind of image in almost total darkness. So, the glow attracts prey, but then the gnat larvae trap it through a curtain of sticky threads

into which prey becomes entangled so that the gnat larvae can suck the juices out of them. Nature, eh? Such a thing of joy.

We went into a second cave, again in darkness, and paused at the far end. When we turned on our torches, we could then see

insects called Weta, specifically Cave Weta (well, we were in a cave, after all). They’re quite large, but not as large as the Giant Weta, which is about the size of a mouse. We won’t see any of them, though; apart from on some islands, the giant ones have been driven extinct by introduced predators – weasels, stoats, cats and rats. New Zealand’s ecology evolved over millions of years with almost no mammals (there are two native species of small bat) and thus no mammalian predators and so birds, reptiles and insects were entirely unprepared when such were introduced, and they have a disproportionately large impact. There are programmes to try to cull them, but it’s probably an impossible task.

Another tree that is found throughout this forest, as well as in many other places across New Zealand, is the Manuka or Tea-Tree, which is well-known via the honey that can come from it, which has anti-microbial properties. The oil and sap have the same properties, of course. On our way back to the van, wandering along being deafened by the cicadas all shouting at each other, we passed a set of beehives in a grove of Manuka trees.

It’s not honey-producing season right now; if it were, there would be dozens more beehives. But there was still a lot of apian activity; I was hoping to catch the hum of the bees, but I think that the shouting of the cicadas wins.

And so ended an absorbing, if rather damp, excursion into the Coromandel Forest Park. As we headed back to the van, of course, the sun came out… We bade goodbye to Sue and Peter and John dropped us back at Ferry Landing. We headed across and took a final (excellent) meal at Salt before heading back to Beachfront (where the view from our balcony looks lovely in the late afternoon sun)

and preparing to leave tomorrow. Bugger!

Because tomorrow we head further south on the North Island. Our eventual destination is the smelly city of boiling mud – Rotorua. But we have a couple of things to see on the way there, so stay with us to find out what.