Hahei 7th of October

Luckily the shop is open early, time to buy some bread. In New Zealand the available bread is mainly toast bread.
And a typical New Zealand breakfast would include toast with some kind of marmelade and or bacon and eggs. Both are not necesarrily my favourites.

So I have come up with a alternative solution. In most supermarkets you can buy hummus and a particular good brand in New Zealand is Lisa's, they sell all kinds and i really like the one with kumara, second to that a one with tomato is nice as well. Actually all variaties from Lisa's must be nice, and I will try out a number of them during the rest of my trip. Next to the hummus nutella is also available, and once in a while salmon is nice too.

So much for breakfast, today I started by travelling to the ferry landing. The ferry transfers people to Whitianga, you would pronounce this as Fittianga. All 'WH'are actually pronounced as an F.

That is most i can recommend about Fitianga, it is like a kind of 'Renesse' in the Netherlands mainly focussed on tourism and not very authentic. The one thing i can really recommend is the Monk Street Market, they sell really good cheeses and a lot of other delicious organic products. Next to that they also sell a number of 'authentic Dutch' products like beschuit or stroopwafels and pepermunt.  
 
From Hahei towards the ferry landing shakespeares point provides nice views and a walk towards lonely beach. When i visited i was not lonely there were others as well.

In the afternoon we went to Hot Water Beach (see picture), which is nice to view humans perform group behaviour. At 2 small spots hot gasses mix with water and it is actually quite strange to walk in cold seawater and your feet are in hot sand. To actually participate in the digging was next to impossible because there were quite a number of people trying to create their own little hot spa. Anyway it was nice to watch them for a little while. The next stop was the surf beach next to the hot water beach. This was an almost deserted beach, but to be honest that was a nice change from the crowded hot water spots.

To top of the day we visited the Cathedral Cove a 2nd time, and honestly this is 10 times better then the hot water beach. This time we also took the side trips to stingray beach and gemstone beach both are really recommendable as well.
During our second visit the tide was a less lower than the previous visit which allowed for a nice walk to the other side of the cove. It is really an amazing peace of beach. In case Teus is reading this as well this could be a spot
to ask a particular question ;-).