The Coastal Walkway

Sunday, January 06, 2013
Coromandel, North Island, New Zealand
Up early for a full day trip up the Coromandel Peninsula. First stop was Colville for coffee - really quite a small town but it has it's own tennis club and a primary school. Beyond Colville the roads are mostly gravel or dirt and fairly rough in places. Rental cars can't be driven on these roads although I'm pretty sure some people ignore this. We followed the west coast most of the way up to Fletcher Bay.

The countryside was beautiful and our guide, Barbara, told us a lot about the history of the area . A large section of the land at the top of the peninsula is owned by one family, split into four farms. This family is very keen that the land should remain undeveloped.

There are Pohutukawa trees all the way along the Peninsula with beautiful red flowers. This tree is related to the Australian bottle brush and blooms around Christmas time so New Zealanders call it the Christmas Tree.

We arrived at Fletcher Bay about 11am and started on the 8km walk to Stony Bay. This is an amazing walk over farmland and hills, through native forest full of ferns and Pohutukawa trees around the coast. The views are stunning and the walk is not too hard although there are some steep slopes. It took us about 4 hours and when we reached Stony Bay Barbara was waiting with a very welcome cup of tea and homemade cake.

It was too cold to swim and in any case the surf was quite rough with a strong undertow but the whole day was wonderful and really worth doing.

Back at the Harbour View we decided we were too tired to cook so went into town for a very nice pizza then went back to our motel to relax.


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