The past few days have been pretty great. Thursday night I was working hard trying to plan out my presentation, and someone suggested a giant game of campus-wide Man Hunt at 9:00. I almost opted out because of all the work I had to do, but at the last minute I changed my mind, and I'm SO glad I did. We all dressed up like ninjas (all black polypro/spandex with bandanas over our faces) and split into two teams with the Wharekai as the safe zone and climbing wall as jail. Even though our team lost (marginally..) it was sooo much fun and I'm glad that I took a break and played.
Friday morning was a bit stressful and I woke up early to run before I had kitchen crew, then spent the rest of the morning and early afternoon rehearsing my presentation. My group helped out a bit and by 1:00 I felt pretty good about it. The presentation went well according to them, and I felt okay too! I don't normally like public speaking but I think Ecoquest is making that a lot easier for me. Being pushed out of my comfort zone is definitely a good thing. After the presentations, we had one last lecture and then everyone was kind of dispersing. We had friday night and saturday off so some people made plans to go to Raglan to surf, others to Hot Water Beach to camp, and my group decided to just CHILL for once with plans take a day trip to the Coromandel the next day to beach hop.
Since it was only the 7 of us, we more or less had free reign over the kitchen for the night, which was excellent. Put some good music on over the ghetto-blaster and cooked and baked away. It was so weird having only girls around, and this was my first official girls-only night the whole time that I've been in NZ. We made dumplings and starry and then for dessert we got a little crazy… I busted out my famous chocolate chip recipe and we made GIANT ice cream pizza's as well as chocolate and vanilla buttercream frosting on the side to dip and spread at will. Dale (one of the field leaders, only a few years older than us) joined us for dinner as well as Hermoine's husband (he's from Holland originally), which made for some great conversation. Dale never ceases to amuse. We planned a little bit of our trip to Northland but for the most part everything is kind of up in the air.
The rest of the night was just spent at Grannie's watching "Into the Wild." I've seen the movie so many times and read the book but it never gets old, it's still one of my favorites. Some of the girls hadn't seen it and they loved it, and are finally able to understand some of the references I often make ("SOCIETY!" or "You're the apple of my eye, apple").
We got up early and made some gourmet breakfast for ourselves (what can you expect with a bunch of foodies? haha) and some guacamole for our sandwiches! Mmmm. On the drive we actually ended up driving through a 100k/200k bike race! It was super exciting and we rolled past the cyclists on the brutal climbs cheering them on. They seemed to appreciate the encouragement :) Our field leader from the south island, John, was actually racing it, but we didn't end up seeing him. Our first stop was to Cathedral Cove, a famous spot on the Coromandel Peninsula about a 2 hour drive away from Ecoquest.
The weather was kind of crumby and was drizzling as well as colder than it was in Kaiaua. It didn't put much of a damper on the experience though, we just didn't go swimming/tanning. The hike out of Cathedral Cove was about 30 minutes. The actual cove was technically closed due to recent rockfalls but we went through it anyway because we had a great goal in mind: SECRET BEACH!
"Secret beach" is this infamous spot that has been passed down from generation to generation of ecoquesters. It's accessed from Cathedral cove but involves almost half an hour of bouldering along a rocky coast. It was really cool to climb all kind of volcanic rock and notice all the strange formation. The waves were crazy today and we were often getting sprayed by them crashing on the rocks. Finally we made it! There was a little "shack" set up (we're not sure by whom) and a huge pohutekawa tree which we sat under to ate our lunch (and the rain stopped!). It would have been a lot cooler if we could have spent the day there with sunny skies and warm weather, but we will definitely try to get back there before December 10th rolls around. Next stop: Wendy's house.
In exchange for dropping us off at the rental place, Wendy asked us to stop by her house by Cook's Beach and pick up her mail for her and encouraged us to munch on anything ripe in her garden. We ended up finding some asparagus that was ready for picking and ate it raw. I never would have thought that it would taste good, but it was delicious! We left and headed for Hot Water Beach, but ended up taking a detour to this little winery that Sam and Sara noticed on the drive in. If you blinked you would have missed it, as I did.
This place, Purangi Estate, was SO cool! It was really cool and full of character. We were greeted by a cute cat that followed us around and the owner ushered us inside to this room with dusky bottles of wine and liqueur and just started cracking jokes (mostly poking fun at Americans in general and our accents and Australians) and pouring all different kinds of alcohol. We tried feijoia, plum, and honey liqueur all of which was delicious. He had some pretty strange flavors but everything was so intriguing to taste. We asked him what he thought about Scrumpies (a cheap hard cider made in NZ that comes in 1.25L plastic bottles) and just laughed and ran out back, and brought back some feijoia cider which we all sampled. Needless to say, this was much better than Scrumpies. All of this was for free! Clearly his charismatic marketing worked and after 45 minutes or so, we all settled on our favorites and made our purchases.
When we left Purangi, the weather totally turned around and the sky opened up. Our last stop of the day was Hot Water Beach, which is a beach that people go to and dig their own hot pool. There are springs right on the tide line and the hot water rises up through the sand. It was really cool and the water was scalding hot in some places if you weren't careful. We didn't have the actual means to dig a huge pit for ourselves so we were content with just dipping our feet in. It was relaxing and beautiful. On this particular beach there were very few barrier islands and the waves started breaking very far from shore, making it quite a good beach for surfing.
The ride home was great. Girl talks, Disney movie singsongs, all of that good stuff. I love day trippin'.
Tomorrow morning we're leaving bright and early and heading up to Northland (Poor Knight's, an island ~20 miles off shore) to do some snorkeling in one of the most famous Marine Reserves in the world. We'll be staying at the University of Auckland's marine lab for 4 nights, and then we are set free for our last long weekend to explore Northland ourselves. So I'll be back the 8th of November, hopefully with some more great adventures to share.
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