Cathy’s Blog

Planning a one-off trip to New Zealand I decided that in the seven weeks I planned to be there I wanted to see as much of the country as I could without too much inconvenience and with more home comforts than a tent could offer - despite it being the middle of summer - so I opted for the motorhomes route.

This turned out to be an excellent idea. It doesn’t take long to realise that in New Zealand you can go from torrential rain to scorching sun in a matter of minutes so shelter is always needed and you don’t want to faffing about erecting tents in any of this.

On arrival at Auckland airport, we were then taken by free bus to the motorhome depot. After dealing with the paperwork and being shown all over the motorhome to ensue we were familiar with it we threw in our luggage and set off for the nearest camp site.

Now this may sound contradictory - getting a motorhome yet staying on a camp site however, there was good reason for this. We had been travelling for 24 hours and not had a wink of sleep. We felt tired and drained and hungry and we also had colds coming. So, the best thing for us was to stop at a site where we could unpack our luggage into the van properly, have a hot shower and a good sleep without having to drive too far.

The next day we were feeling much more refreshed and took our motorhome across to the Coromandel Peninsula to visit Hot Water Beach. Pulling up at an idyllic spot overlooking the sea we clmbed out of the motorhome and soaked up the views and the sun. And then got back in the motorhome!

We had arrived mid-day on a particularly scorching hot day. New Zealand is one of those countries where the saying only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun truly applies! It was far too hot and we could feel ourselves burning within the first ten minutes. No wonder there was nobody else around!

We took shelter in the motorhome for a few hours until the burning sun began to dip in the sky and we could see the natives venturing out. The temperature had cooled enough to encourage people out onto the sand to dig holes and bathe in the hot water springs from the local volcano that made their way to the beach. After a wonderful ‘community’ feel to the afternoon and some very relaxing bathing, we were able to simply step back into the motorhome, shower, eat and sleep without having to turn a wheel.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 at 9:06 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.