Hotwater Beach & Cathedral Cove

Hey Everyone!

So for this trip Alyse, some friends, and I took a coach out to Coromandel Peninsula, about 3 hours East of Auckland. The next few posts will highlight our time there; I took a bunch of pics so I figured I should separate them.
We stopped off at Hotwater beach on the way, aptly named for the springs that gurgle up hot water on the beach (at low tide). As the pictures show, it was a bit crowded, this beach being an increasingly popular tourist destination. With only a few minutes before the bus headed out again, I just snapped a few pictures.
Our next stop was a beach nearby, where we hopped on a dinghy that took us all around the various coves and caves. It's not readily evident from the photos, but we were flying around the rocks, making photography a somewhat haphazard affair (also true on account of the large body of water surrounding my treasured, not waterproof, camera).
Composing a nice shot was less a matter of actually thinking about composition / subject / timing and more about pointing the camera in the general direction of something moderately interesting, taking lots of wide-angle pictures (the better to crop / tilt later), and praying at least one of them wouldn't have the side of the boat covering everything except sky.
Most pictures did not survive the iPhoto chopping block.
After that we hopped back on the coach, and got to stop by a winery for a free tasting since the coach driver knew the owner. New Zealand wines, by and large, leave something to be desired (it's very moist here). They did have a mean feijoa liquer, but it was a bit out of my price range, and I haven't really figured out what sort of food one has with a liquer (if any)... they seem like such strange spirits.

Anywho, more to continue next time!

--David

PS: I just thought I should throw in this link to a wikipedia article about moas. They are so intense! Since the Māori got rid of them, the islands have been pretty much completely devoid of any animals threatening to humans (except the "West Island", which is chock full of scary critters).