Tuesday 05 March

Hahei Beach, The Coromandel
After a good night's sleep back on the care made an early start this morning. The sky was heavy and overcast when we woke up and as we journeyed north it started to rain, lightly at first, and then with increasing determination. We stopped at Katikati to pick up some meat, still thinking that maybe the rain would ease and we would be camping at Wentworth Valley DoC site, lighting a fore and having a BBQ. By the time we reached Whangamata it was double speed windscreen wiper stuff, so camping on a DoC site with no cover at all was not going to be very comfortable. We had to decide what to do, it just seemed like a replay of The Catlins. If we went on driving, hoping to leave the rain behind us we could end up missing out the Coromandel, just driving straight through it as we had done The Catlins. So we decided to check into some accommodation for the night and hopefully by the morning the rain would have passed. We had previously considered camping at the Holiday Park at Hot Water Beach so we headed there, only to find that all the cabins and chalets were already booked. So we went on to the Hahei Beach Holiday Park, just a few kms further on and the only accommodation they had left was a studio, so here we are with an expensive but very comfortable stop-over for the night, my own shower and toilet for 24 hours, what luxury. As it is fully equipped it means we haven't had to get our own bed linen and other stuff in from the car, so nothing is getting wet. It continued to rain off and on apart from a brief spell on the mid-afternoon when we walked down to the beach. It is a stunning cove, even in the dark, leaden skies and heavy clouds it was breathtakingly beautiful. A curve of beach is backed by cliffs and mounds of rock are scattered in the sea. We have decided that if the weather is OK tomorrow and the rain has passed over we will stay here for amother day. We had a look around the site and there are loads of camping places, I think lots of campers rushed into accommodation because of the weather today and that is why it was full. So let's hope the rain has stopped by the morning. Local people won't agree of course, they really need rain, we can see that, everywhere is very dry. It does seem incredulous that is a country with such vast water resources, lakes, streams, rivers, so many people rely on rain water. It was some time before I realised what the enormous containers outside houses were, they are for rainwater storage. I hope they all got them filled this morning, it felt as if there was enough rain to fill a small swimming pool.