My time on the magnificent Coromandel peninsula has ended…for now. I finished up another great week of WOOFing at Wild Joy - full of more honey harvesting and extracting, garden work, filling honey pots, and slashing through the forest clearing the track to the Kapowai waterfall.
Learning how honey is processed from the hive to the jar and being part of each of those steps was a very unique and rewarding experience. From the heavy and hot work in the fields harvesting the boxes full of honeycomb, the raw honey ends up in the honey room where the extracting process begins. Three machines progressively extract more and more honey; the final one (essentially a centrifuge) pumps the honey into the barrels to be tested and shipped out. There are obviously quite a few details left out, but that is the short and sweet of it. (pun intended)
The afternoon adventures away from the bee ranch were never disappointing. My explorations offered insight and history of the place Polynesian islanders found and made home and the location Captain Cook landed and began his journey to circumnavigate and map the rest of the country. There was the crowded international spectacle of folks digging in the sand and soaking in the natural hot springs at Hot Water Beach. I found great joy kayaking up the local Kopawai River. The remote and pristine New Chum’s Beach offered solitude and rest. And One of my favorite places on the peninsula was Hahei Beach, a little beach town, with a short hike to the popular Cathedral Cove (a rainy day for me, but beautiful nonetheless). Cathedral Cove was one of the locations at which Narnia was filmed. It is no wonder that two of the most epic and enchanting stories (in my opinion) that were made into movies, were filmed in such an enchanting place. #Narnia #Lord of The Rings #The Hobbit #The Shire is up next!
After saying goodbye to Maarten and Jenny, who loaded me up with manuka honey, honey mead, and heaps of fresh fruit, I headed north to hike around the northern tip from Stony Bay to Fletcher Bay. I then found myself driving down the west coast of the peninsula (reminiscent of driving down Highway 1 with east coast beach towns mixed in but on a much narrower road with overhanging pohutukawa trees). I passed through Thames and headed inland into the Kauaeranga Valley, where I hiked up to The Pinnacles, the jagged remnant of the inside of a volcano. Like northland, you could easily spend a month or more exploring the Coromandel. But on I go.
Oh yeah, I found my town too now. I can appreciate a place that names things after me, and even more, knows how to spell my name correctly and not as a unit of measurement!
Much more to come…
