Tag Archives: Scenery

Transfer to the Coromandel Peninsula

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Friday 13 February 2026 – Jane had ensured that the room we had at the Auckland City Hotel had a kitchenette, which gave two advantages. Firstly, of course, we could prepare mugs of Twining’s Finest Earl Grey* at times of our choosing; and secondly, we could prepare our own breakfast, since the buffet at the hotel was OK but short on fruit and not particularly good value. As well as the longed-for dental gear, we’d also stocked up with fruit and yoghurt so that we could breakfast at leisure and reasonably healthily.

The mission for yesterday was simple – check out of the hotel, pick up a hire car and drive to our next destination, Whitianga, on the Coromandel Peninsula. We manhandled our bags for the 10-minute walk to the car hire office. It’s actually an 8-minute walk, but one tends to spend a lot of time standing around waiting for the lights to change at busy and large intersections. On occasion I’m tempted to ignore the lights and just walk across if it’s obvious that there’s no reason to wait. But four or five lanes lugging baggage encouraged caution, so I waited for the lights with barely-concealed impatience.

At the Budget offices, the hire process appeared to be going smoothly until Kevin, the chap sorting us out, queried the end date of the booking, which he had as 22nd March. This is, indeed, the end date of our trip here, but we only need this car until we get to Christchurch on the South Island, at which point we hop a train. We were supposed to have a booking for a new hire car for when/where we disembark the train and thus the rest of our stay, and it seems that the local agents for Discover The World hadn’t twigged this.  Fortunately the sainted Kevin (he of the arcade?) and his boss, Sue, sorted the situation out for us and we’re grateful for their staff work. The queue of customers building up behind us probably weren’t, though.

So we took possession of a brand spanking new Mitsubishi ASX, with just 35km on the clock, which will be our steed for the next three weeks or so. It’s a bit larger than I’m used to (though not the utter monster we got in A Coruña when we walked the Camino Finisterre) so we started a bit gingerly whilst I got used to the car. Being Japanese and in New Zealand, the indicators and wipers are the other way round from UK cars, so driving round roundabouts with the wipers going will be a feature of the next few days – and the first few days of driving back in the UK, no doubt.

Anyhoo… our exit from Auckland was smooth and through only slightly congested traffic, and then we had the decision to make as to whether to take the more direct route to Whitianga or go the pretty way. We decided on the latter. And it was a very pleasant drive, through lots of typical North Island landscapes.

We (of course) saw sheep.

New Zealand is often quoted as having more sheep than people, and ChatGPT tells me that this is still true, though not as much as in the 1980s, when there were some 22 sheep per inhabitant. These days it’s nearer four or five.  What surprised a little, though, were the numbers of cattle.

The area we were driving through, round the bottom of the Firth of Thames, being flat, was obviously very well suited to either dairy or beef farming.  I read that there are about half as many cattle as sheep on the island, and they’re split roughly 60-40 in favour of dairy animals.

I guess many people will have read of the enormous amounts of rainfall that have been suffered in the North Island, and saw for our own eyes some evidence of its effects.

We stopped for coffee (OK, yes, and ice cream) at The Pink Shop at Kaiaua,

which is a very individual kind of place, serving as cafe, ice-creamery, eatery, corner shop, post office and second-hand bookshop.

They claim to serve the best coffee in Kaiaua, and I think this might be because there isn’t another cafe there, but it was a welcome break on the journey and the ice-cream was very good.

A little further along the road there actually was another cafe, but we decided not to stop there.

We carried on, through ever-impressive New Zealand landscapes but darkening weather.

After one leaves the flat plains south west of the Firth of Thames and starts up the Coromandel Peninsula, the roads become quite twisty, with climbs and descents, so sometimes one is by the coast

but more often into more hilly countryside. As one might expect, this gives rise to some more handsome scenery, and the roads feature lots of places where it’s safe to stop at the side to take photos.

It really was lovely scenery and it made the journey a pleasure.

We arrived at our accommodation, the Beachfront Resort in Whitianga, at around 4pm yesterday, and were greeted very genially by Paul on the reception and taken to our suite, which is comfortable and is set up entirely for self-catering. So we had a cup of tea, obviously, and then headed out for the fleshpots of Whitianga in search of (a) understanding where we had to get to for the items on our itinerary whilst we’re here, (b) sustenance for the day and (c) breakfast for the subsequent days we’ll be here.

Our schedule includes a couple of planned activities: a half-day cruise around the local coast and an all-day hike. In both cases we have to get to the local wharf, and for the hike we have to catch the shuttle ferry across to the other side (a place engagingly called Ferry Landing).

Having understood how all that worked, our next priority was to find a restaurant for an early dinner. Jane has good instinct for these things, and so, despite the fact that it was raining, we made our way past several eateries in order to get to a place called Salt,

which is a cocktail bar and restaurant. And a very good restaurant, too: we had a great meal based around snapper (yes, I had fish’n’chips) for outstanding value. Whilst we ate, the rain came lashing down, right through the screen that was supposed to protect us,

But it was only a shower, albeit a biblical one, and it was interesting to see the screen once the gusting wind had cleared the rain.

All we had to do then was to find a supermarket to get comestibles for the morrow, and there’s a substantial Woolworth’s in the town so that bit was straightforward.

And that was yesterday sorted.  Today we were supposed to be going on the cruise, but it, sadly, fell victim to the windy and wet weather,

but the hike should go ahead tomorrow, and can maybe be engineered to see on land some of the sights we would have seen from the boat. The practical upshot of this is that much of today has been a day (thus far) of splendid relaxation and further trying to get over jet lag (I’m getting there, slowly).

However, sloth for an entire day is not an option (I’m told. In no uncertain terms); we are travelling and so we Can’t Just Sit Around All Day (bugger!). What do you do on a rainy day? You go to a museum. Fortunately, Whitianga has one. What luck!

Whitianga might be a tiny place, but the area has some significant history. Just around the corner – the other side of that ferry journey – is Cook’s Beach, where he moored the Endeavour in 1769. He witnessed the transit of Mercury whilst here, and hence gave the name of Mercury Bay to the area. He also attended a powhiri, a welcoming ceremony with a local chieftain, where they exchanged gifts (Cook donated the potato to this new land) and established a meeting of minds between the two nations. The interpreter, by the way, was a gifted local linguist.

The museum covers the period from 950AD when the first humans, a Polynesian called Kupe and his crew, set foot on New Zealand; but it wasn’t until 150 years later that Polynesians came in numbers to colonise the new land.

Obviously, there’s Polynesian history figures in the exhibits, with models of the boats they used

This is a model of a 20m replica, Te Aurere, built in the 1990s to demonstrate the voyaging capabilities of these boats.

and examples demonstrating the skill in carving.

There’s a lot of information about Cook, of course, and a rather uninspiring display about HMS Buffalo, a convict and timber transport vessel which was wrecked in Mercury Bay in 1840 (the year of the Treaty of Waitangi), It gave its name to Buffalo Beach, beside which I am typing the very words. Other things covered in the museum include: inevitably, the Kiwi

among displays of other local birds

including, let us not forget, the Giant Moa

an enormous (extinct) bird with an improbably small head; information about historical aspects of the area, including mining; and information about the Kauri tree, an important conifer, particularly to the Māori, who historically used its timber in boat construction (pub quiz fact: it’s the only native timber that floats) and its gum for a variety of purposes. A European-driven industry grew up around it in the 1800s, similar to the Huon Pine we saw in Tasmania, and by the 1930s most Kauri forest had been logged. It’s also significantly threatened by Kauri Dieback, which is transmitted via tiny spores, very often carried on the soles of shoes. This kind of ecological threat explains why biosecurity is taken so seriously on entry to New Zealand.

There is something of a disconnect between the opening hours of the various establishments in Whitianga; the museum stays open until 4pm, but the restaurants, as far as we could tell, don’t open until 5pm (and the cafes closed at 2pm). So we pottered back to our accommodation for a couple of hours before venturing once more into town.  Having looked at the options, we settled on a place called Get Stoked and headed there through some reasonably heavy rain.  It turned out to be a cheerful and slightly noisy place, and provided very tasty salads and fish, though a Greek would not have immediately recognised the salad bit. We ended up chatting to a couple of old codgers on the table next to us for a few minutes before we left. It was a swift but very amiable meal and the pissing rain had stopped by the time we left, which was a plus.

We’re on a tour involving some hiking tomorrow, on the Cook’s Bay side, and have to get across the ferry betimes to meet our guide, so we’re back to early starts for a couple of days. The forecast is basically damp – anything from showers to deluges, temperatures in the mid-20s and humidity in the mid-90s. I hope we don’t get too badly drenched, but you’ll have to come back to find out how the day unfolded.

 

 

 

 

*  To their credit, the Auckland City Hotel provided Earl Grey tea in the room and large cups from which to drink it. It wasn’t Twining’s Finest, but it was perfectly decent; evidence, should one need it, that New Zealand is a civilised country.

Sense of Humor failure

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Sunday 28 September 2025 – It was a strangely cold morning. The actual temperature wasn’t as low as it had been the day before, when there was frost on the grass and ice making the painted wooden steps to our bedroom somewhat perilous; but it felt colder, and Madame had a wood burner going in the dining area,

which Roşie (Ginger) appreciated rather more than guard duties. The skies were cloudy, and the sun even peeped through from time to time during the day; but we wore jackets for the day’s hike.

The objective for the day was to visit – you guessed it – another monastery, Mănăstirea Humorului. So, Humor Monastery with a bit of Romanian post-appending of definite articles and so forth – officially a 17km walk. Our information had us starting from a town called Solca, some 20 minutes’ drive away and once again Gabriel was our chauffeur and Daniela his lookout because the steering wheel was on the wrong side of the car. They actually dropped us some way beyond Solca towards our destination, thus saving us about 4km of walking along a tarmac road. We were able to start off on a dirt road, which made for a more pleasant walking environment,

at least for the stretch which led to tarmac.

After that, we were on tarmac roads, mainly without sidewalks, for the rest of the walk. To start with, we headed downhill, past a handsome (Catholic) church

and through a village with some idiosyncracies in the housing decor.

Gnomes were a popular decoration

I knew, from the GPS track we’d been provided with, that the route was up and down, with a fairly substantial up in the middle, but hoped that the gentler gradient on offer wouldn’t be too irksome.

Faint hope.

The gradient wasn’t very steep, but there was a 3km stretch where we had to climb 250 metres, which was a relentless and dull trudge. Round every bend, just when you thought “is this the top?”, the uphill road seemed to stretch eternally onwards. However, these things must pass if one simply keeps plodding on, and eventually we got to a point where neither geology or physics could maintain the uphill grind,

at a village called Plesa. It was certainly a plesa to stop and admire the view

and the prospect of sitting down for a bit of a rest. Before Jane allowed us that, though, she had found Something Of Interest for us to investigate, so we headed off down a rough track, which passed a chapel, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

Just past the chapel, on the left, was a prominent rocky outcrop, topped by  a cross.

The ladder there should give you the clue that not all was as it seems; this set of rocks was the basis for a set of artworks sculpted into the stone. They’re not immediately obvious – someone casually walking along the track might well have missed them.

However, courtesy of Jane’s research, we were In The Know, and so we spent some time investigating. Here’s the close up of the shot above, in which the sculptures are much clearer,

and clambering carefully around revealed several more.

Once back on the road we treated ourselves to a few minutes’ rest and a bite to eat before continuing our walk. We went through a couple of reasonably sizeable villages.  One, Solonețu Nou, distinguished itself in two ways: an attractive architectural vernacular for the well housings;

and probably the noisiest selection of house dogs we’d yet experienced in this country.

To our British eyes, the Romanian habit of cooping up their dogs seems harsh; there are quite a few small enclosures with large dogs in them, with barely room to turn round, far less to get exercise. Many dogs are free in gardens, and we even found a handful in the road, who were noisy but didn’t do anything more than bark. I suppose that these are simply guard dogs, there to alert people to intruders, though I don’t know whether these would be human or animal; and in any case there seemed to be no-one home to be alerted (possibly in itself a reason for the dogs to be agitated). We only ever saw a dog being taken out and exercised a couple of times when we were here. Definitely Cultural Dissonance at work, in more ways than one.

We trudged on. Occasionally the view was good,

and the houses we passed engaging,

(this is a sculptor’s house and atelier – we wonder if he has something to do with the stone sculptures); but it was dull work and there was a reasonable amount of traffic to dodge. Eventually, though, we came to the turn off which led to our accommodation, which was called Maridor.  The track to it led us through some kind of logging operation

out a kilometre or so to a small group of houses;

ours was the big yellow one.

It was open, but deserted, except for a young teenage lad who spoke enough English to show us our room and tell us that dinner would be available at 7pm, but who otherwise seemed (a) not to know any further details and (b) not to be very comfortable in his role. No matter; despite the walk only having been about 13km, I was very tired and in need of rest, so we took it easy for a bit before going for a walk. Obviously.

Humor Monastery was a good 2km away, and the exact way in was not obvious. There was a car park (with several coaches in it), surrounded by the usual keen-eyed entrpreneurial locals

but we eventually found out where we could buy tickets, and we followed the crowds in.

To a building site, sadly; most of the area was fenced off.

Actually, we were sort of lucky – pictures online from a few days earlier showed it covered in scaffolding (it looks as though they had been replacing the roof, judging from its light colour) so at least we were spared that, and could get some idea of the frescoes on the outside.

As with the Moldovița monastery, the frescoes on the windward side had faded sadly

but the external narthex ceiling was still in good shape

as were the frescoes on the entrance wall of the church.

Jane was particularly taken by the elephant

which we think is shown as part of the Noah’s Ark story.

Inside the church there was the usual prohibition against photography, but since people were flagrantly ignoring this and the nuns appeared not to mind, I took a few photos of the interior, which, like them all, is spectacular.

Having seen the monastery, we felt that an ice cream would be Just The Thing, so headed back to the kiosk in the retail-heavy car park, only to find it was closed. Well, Sunday, innit? So we decided to investigate the neighbouring church, which looked very impressive

but was closed. Well, Sunday, innit?

So we started the trudge back to Maridor. We passed some interesting railings outside one place, with representations of the signs of the zodiac;

and, just by our turn off into the boondocks there was a shop which appeared to be open. So we went in. The lady in charge didn’t seem too pleased to see us, but we sorted ourselves out with a couple of bananas, and an ice cream each and paid. As we left the shop, she locked up behind us and drove off! We were lucky to get there in the nick of time, which made up for the earlier ice cream disappointment and went some way to dispelling the sadness at the state of the monastery site; it was such a shame to see it so faded, and slightly irritating to have access so limited. We didn’t get a real sense of what the monastery really looked like (hence the title of this page).

Back at Mirador, all was quiet, and we were actually wondering whether we really would get a dinner. But we did. At 6.55, I went out and the only sign of life was the lad, whose name is Vilanel (he’s just socially awkward, not a psychopathic killer in search of Eve); he assured me that there would be dinner at 7, so we went down and joined Julia and Heather, the ladies we’d met at Casa Felicia, and who were basically a day ahead of us on the Natural Adventure itinerary. It was nice to chat to them again and it gave us a chance to find out some useful information, such as getting to and from the final monastery of this trip and also getting to the train back to Bucharest. Vilanel had been very helpful for them organising taxis and telling them what they needed to know. His parents, who run Maridor, didn’t have much English, but Vilanel’s was good – learned, apparently, more from social media than from school.

So, after a very tasty dinner, we established what would happen on the morrow for our monastery visit and also what the schedule would be for the next day. The weather prospects were dismal, which meant we decided on a variation to the suggested itinerary. Exactly what that was, you will be able to find out by coming back to these pages.

Moldovița – a smaller monastery on a bigger day

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Saturday 27 September 2025 – The half-day’s activity envisaged for today turned into a very enjoyable whole day’s set of activities. The morning was taken up with a visit to another monastery, at Moldovița, a half-hour drive from our accommodation. Our chauffeur was Gabriel, the boyfriend of Daniela, the daughter of the house. I was quite surprised when the car he led us out to was actually a British model, steering wheel on the right-hand side an’everyfink. It turned out that he had only relatively recently left England, where he’d been first studying and then working for a few years; he could legally drive his British car for a total of 90 days before having to do something about it. It was very convenient for us to have a local guide who had such good English, and we were pleased that Daniela also joined us.

I had expected simply to be deposited at the monastery and left to our own devices whilst we wandered around it, but actually the two of them joined us in viewing the monastery, and were able to provide some commentary about it, which was very welcome. It being a Saturday, it was clear that there would be quite a few people there (there was a coach parked outside, for example), but we’d got there early in the hope that the crowds wouldn’t be too oppressive.

Anyway, the monastery: this is the sight that greets you as you enter.

The central church building sits within a pleasant, albeit fortified, complex.

As with Sucevița, the outside is painted with saints and biblical stories. It’s not as large as the one in Sucevița, but it’s still very striking. The frescoes have fared well on one side,

but sadly, on the other,

the prevailing winds and rain have wrought great damage. This church dates from 1532, when Prince Petru Rares built it as a replacement for another church which had collapsed. We went into the church for a look around.

It has an external narthex,

and inside there was the expected ban on photography. However, two things convinced me that I could get away with taking a few pictures: Gabriel said that it should be all right; and other visitors were brazenly taking photos anyway. I think maybe the use of flash is what the monastery was particularly trying to avoid. So, here are a few pictures of the inside, which, as with the others, is hugely ornately painted.

In preparation for the day, Jane had, as ever, been researching other things to see in the area, and she had come up with a very unusual-sounding option – a decorated egg museum, just a couple of minutes drive away. Daniela and Gabriel were happy to take us there so we could look around. It’s actually the residence of a specific artist, Lucia Condrea, and is situated at the end of a row of pretty houses.

We paid the entrance fee (though I discovered later that we could have simply sneaked in through the front door) and were treated to an explanation of a film of the artist actually creating coloured eggs, using a batik technique, which involves covering with wax the parts of an egg that should not be coloured, before immersing the egg in a colouring dip – and then repeating the process with different colours; so the artist has to visualise the pattern as a negative rather than a positive image. It was interesting to see the film… but the place is astonishing. Lucia Condrea has created over fifteen thousand eggs in her lifetime, and the interior shows a stupefying variety of sizes, shapes, patterns and colours.

There is huge elaboration in the eggs,

and the artist has taken, as her inspiration, patterns from fabrics, from other cultures, and many and various sources. There are a couple of pictures of her on the walls with local dignitaries.

Upstairs, there are a couple of rooms dedicated to eggs from other places, literally all over the world.

It was nice to see Britain represented

and we were particularly taken by these, from New Zealand.

How do they do that?

There were eggs for sale in the place, but we didn’t have sufficient cash and they didn’t have a working card machine, so we left empty-handed and started the journey back to Sucevița. The journey takes you over some hills and past some great views; Gabriel had said on the way out that we could stop at one viewpoint on our way back, and so we did.  It was called Pasul Palma and had a couple of kiosks there, but not evidently a huge amount else. I thought it was just to look at the view, which was indeed great,

but actually we spent quite a lot of time there for one reason or another. Taking coffee was one reason, and we sat overlooking the view as we drank it.  It turns out that the place also offfers guided horse rides

and there’s a zip wire across the valley, too; we watched a few people whizzing down the wire as we drank our coffee. Across the road from these kiosks was a huge sculpture of a hand

which is the logo of the place – “palma” means palm, as in palm of the hand, and the place, according to Gabriel, is to acknowledge the hard manual labour undertaken by people in rebuilding the country (or some such – he wasn’t absolutely certain of this). Anyway, the sculpture was, as one might expect, a nexus for some nifty Romanian entrepreneurship.

There were stalls selling liqueurs, cheeses

folk remedies, and tourist tat, of course.

Daniela and Gabriel bought a couple of things, and we got some home-made chocolatey thing which took our fancy.  Then Daniela mentioned fried potatoes. So we went to the final kiosk in this area

which sold, courtesy of a chap out the back,

the local equivalent of chips. These would be cooked to order and ready in 15 minutes, we were told, so there was nothing for it but to buy a beer and do some more sitting and admiring the view.

Overall, this was a pleasant and unexpected interlude, which was fairly closely followed by another. We had discussed walking up a (reportedly very steep) path to a chapel which gave a view of the Sucevița monastery from above. Our information said that the route going up was so steep that coming down it was not recommended and that you should follow a different path for which it provided vague instructions – “you cannot get lost”. Heather at dinner had said she’d tried to follow the instructions for this and had got lost, ending up walking along a track made by a tractor to get down. Doing this climb had been one of the things I had been considering for my afternoon’s adventure, but Daniela said that there was an easier path that led from their very house and gave a better view. So, having completed our journey back to Casa Felicia, that’s what we did instead.

We went through the back garden, past the chickens

and a terribly cute puppy called Mimi, who, like many dogs in Romania, was kept in an enclosure. More on this sort of thing in a future post, but for now, we scrambled about a bit up a steep path through pasture and entered a forested area.

Apparently, the right to roam in Romania is pretty absolute – you can walk more or less wherever you like even if it’s private property. We think we covered a mix of private and government land, but we’re not sure, as the maps are not very accurate. There were some very attractive, but probably deadly, mushrooms growing as we made our way through the forest.

There wasn’t a path as such, but Daniela and Gabriel seemed to know where they were going (with a couple of discussions…) and we emerged at the top of a hill, where we could see the monastery, but largely hidden by intervening tree branches. We made our way down to where one could get a better view

at which point Daniela told us that the best path led back up another hill where we would get a really good view. So we did that. It led past some fairly serious logging

which Gabriel said was quite possibly illicit, but not uncommon since policing the forests was very difficult. We carried on to a path that was very steep in places

but we staggered our way up it and emerged at the top, where there is a cross and a really very good view of the monastery and the countryside.

Opposite us, on the other side of the monastery, was the hill up to the chapel

where we could make out a few hardy souls toiling upwards. We, of course, now had to get down from our vantage point

which was also quite steep, but not too daunting. It also gave us a nice aerial view of the small church and graveyard associated with the monastery.

When we got down, we walked past the church to take a look at it, and one could look back up the hill we’d just descended.

In fact, in this picture of the church, you can just make out the cross at the top of the hill.

Yes, you can.

Our route back to our accommodation took us past the monastery, and we called in to see what time they closed. Jane had seen a photo of the monastery illuminated at night, and we very much wanted to see that if possible. We got a very uncertain answer about closing time, so decided that we’d go back after dinner to see if it was still open. We arrived at 7pm, and the door was open so we went in, past the (now closed) closed ticket office. There were still people there, mainly, it seemed, making their way out after some kind of special occasion.

We waited for it to get dark, expecting to be ushered out, but we weren’t. There was some singing coming over the sound system, so I got some slightly atmospheric video of the monastery church at twilight.

It got darker and darker, and everybody else left, so we were pretty much alone – and waiting by the entrance just to make sure we didn’t get locked in.

It got to the point where we realised that they weren’t going to turn on any illuminations. I suppose it makes sense – why spend money on electricity if there’s no-one there to see the result? Maybe they just do it on winter afternoons, when there will be crowds there, or possibly just special occasions. Anyway, not tonight, Josephine. So we made our way back to Casa Felicia and made our preparations for leaving the next day.

The morrow held a visit to another monastery, which we would reach by a longish walk of some 17km. The weather prospects were not as good as today’s but promised rain should at least hold off for the day. So come back to find out how our day went.