First few days

Our friends Harley & Lilian kindly offered us their family bach (cottage) and a loaner car in the unspoiled Coromandel Peninsula for our first 10 days. Then they picked us up at the Auckland airport after our arrival at 5:15 am! It was a four hour drive to the bach and Sheelagh was carsick from the winding roads.


The bach is in the beach town of Matarangi. It has a café & a variety store, and that’s all. There’s no restaurant so we did all our own cooking. Grocery shopping was a 30 minute drive over extremely winding roads (I got car sick again). Otherwise it’s just a few streets full of cottages, although it has a lovely beach. We walked that beach every day, sometimes twice a day.


Some of the lots in Matarangi had only a caravan or two, and a small shed type building. Our friends explained to us that if you buy a section (building lot) in Matarangi, you must build at least a bathroom in the first two years. So that's what people do. In this photo the bathroom is the small building on the left and the caravan is on the right. We saw one lot that had the bathroom and three caravans for use as bedrooms!