While we were in the Coromandel, Mom and I went to Hot Water Beach, which is one of the biggest tourist attractions there, due to it being the coolest thing ever.
We went on the same day as Cathedral Cove, which if you remember back to my post about it, was an amazingly summer-y day for the middle of winter. This means that we were incredibly lucky, because we had beautiful weather, but not the huge crowds of summer. Yay for us! I didn't take very many pictures, because I was not wanting to worry about my camera getting wet or sandy, so I mostly had it packed away.
This is the view from our spot on the beach. Beautiful, but not shockingly different from other beaches. Well, just wait.
Turns out, on this particular beach, hot water pours out from under a huge rock a little way up the beach, and flows through the sand down towards the ocean. This means that you can actually dig yourself a hot tub on the beach! Amazing!
Well, it turns out that it is slightly more complicated than we were anticipating, but also that the complicatedness is half the fun.
Here's how it went. We got there, and saw this awesome little sand-village going on, with people digging holes and re-directing channels and generally having a great time. But we couldn't find a good place to dig, because everywhere that wasn't taken didn't have enough hot water. Then I saw this empty space right near the middle of everything, and thought I'd won the jackpot. I should have know that there was a reason no one was there, but I didn't think of it, and jumped right in. I have never reversed directions so fast in my life! No one was in that space because the water in it was approximately a million degrees! I'm lucky I still have skin on my feet!
Anyway, this lovely group of woman saw us looking and said, "We're just leaving, have our pool!" Kiwis are so nice! So we settled into a nice, warm pool... for about three minutes, at which point it got cold. Our helpful neighbours explained that that happens sometimes, as the hot water shifts as the tide moves in/out. Oh well.
We looked around a bit, and found another good place where we dug our own hole and did some nice relaxing. It was pretty darn exciting to have dug our own hot tub, but the downside was that because the hot water was constantly flowing through, and bringing sand with it, you couldn't actually dig it very deep. But that didn't bother us too much, and digging in the sand is fun, so that's a plus. (I'm noticing now that this picture shows a particularly shallow stage of our hot tub. We never got it as deep as we would have liked, but we did get it deeper than this).
After a few minutes, our pool actually got too hot, and we were wondering what to do about that when this couple in the pool next to ours said, "Ours is actually getting too cold. What if we break down the wall in between and see if we could even it out and share a big pool?" Great idea! So we did, and we ended up with quite a nice big pool, and also some lovely pool-mates to chat with, which we did for quite a while.
So... the complicatedness helped us make some friends, and it was also neat to see other people interacting. People were tapping strangers on the shoulder and saying, "Do you think we could make a small offshoot from your stream of hot water so we could be warmer?" or "Let's build this wall up together to keep the waves out." (Oh, did I mention that the waves were coming right up the the edge of the wall behind my head and every so often sweeping in and totally chilling our warm water? Well, they were. That was quite a surprise the first time).
These varying levels of cooperation and experimentation reminded me strongly of water play in the sandpit at kindergarten, and how great it is for social skills and problem solving. The kindness and openness I saw reinforced my strong belief that grown-ups should spent more time playing in the sand (or playing at all).
Before we left, we figured we'd better get a few pictures of us and our awesome towels and spades, generously loaned to us by our hotel.
We are very successful sand diggers.
Speaking of our lovely hotel, look at our pretty, private courtyard! The ground that looks like sand is actually made entirely of shells, which I love.
J and I are totally going to go back and stay at this hotel again, because it was amazing. Plus, he clearly needs a Coromandel experience, because it was a stunningly beautiful and absolutely fascinating place to be.
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