Saturday 09 March

Coromandel
My 70th birthday
The campsite is a bit crowded, but we knew that it would be, we are in a prime tourist destination and a very popular weekending spot for people from Auckland, and there has been a bicycle race today, I think it is quite an important one on the NZ cycling calendar.  There are lots of serious looking bicycles on the campsite, next to tents and vans and they seem to have block bookings on a lot of the chalets and motels. We have a 50/60ish couple on one side whose nationality I can't determine, they are not very communicative, could be German or Eastern European, they haven't spoken much. The other side we have a group of young people in four small tents, doing a vegetation survey for the Forestry Department. It is part of a Carbon Emission monitoring programme. They are counting the number of trees in designated areas and cataloguing their height and growth. They are very nice and quite earnest. Still it was surprisingly quiet here last night.
We started off this morning with a walk up to a Kauri Grove, where a lot of replanting has taken place. It was a lovely walk through some of the densest forest we have seen and excellent views at the top. Next we took a trip on a narrow gauge railway which started off life as the brainchild off a potter who needed to transport his clay from source to pottery workshop. He was also a railway enthusiast and just continued building it. It is a feat of personal achievement, engineering achievement and environmental achievement. The area covers old mining sites and land which had been logged for Kauri trees and then fired for agriculture. This has, and still is being replanted with Kauri and other indigenous trees, including some rare and threatened specimens. The train goes through tunnels and other bridges. At the high point a lookout building has been erected called the Eyefull Tower. It was an excellent trip.
We went on to a restored Stamper Battery, a remnant of the Gold Mining era. We had a 'conducted tour' by an enthusiastic and eccentric geologist, who told us more about volcanoes and why global warming is not a human condition than we really wanted to know, and not enough about gold extraction and refining, which we really wanted to know about. However seeing the water wheel and the stamper battery in action made the trip worthwhile.
The next event was lunch at a very nice Cafe/Restaurant where we both had excellent meals, mine a local lamb and Kumar (sweet potato) salad and John's a medley of mussels. We ended the day back at the tent, reading and relaxing. What a good birthday.