itself was a gorgeous beach with some pretty stunning rock formations and caves. Low tide was approaching though, so we headed off to Hot Water Beach, a strange phenomenon brought about by hot springs which bubble up through the sand just short of low tide. There were a fair few people there when we arrived, some in bathing attire, and some armed with spades. The basic idea is to dig a hole where the springs are and wait for it to fill up with a mixture of hot water from the springs and cold from the sea. To begin with we couldn’t see what all the fuss was about - we wandered around but couldn’t find any hot water. Suddenly though Hel yelped as she stepped on a hole in the sand that was steaming and nearly scalded her foot!! We guessed that we’d found a spring!! We had a dig around with our hands but a spade was really needed, and fortunately a group of fully equipped people turned up and asked us if they could dig there. Soon enough the resulting hole was full of lovely hot water! Some people had

managed to dig really huge holes big enough for ten bathers, but we settled for just paddling!! The water in the hot pools may have been hot, but the evening was getting chilly, so we retreated to the car park and made a hot chocolate in Bongo and watched the remaining bathers from there. Later that night our luck with the weather started to run out, and we were woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of torrential rain on our roof!!

A gloomier day took us back across the peninsular to have a look at the Kauaeranga Valley, the place where all the $9 DOC campsites were. We ended up doing a couple of lovely short walks there. It’s a lush green valley with dense forest, much of which again was heavily logged by us Europeans. We visited a model of a Kauri Dam. These trees were so big that sometimes the only way to get them down a valley was to build a dam with a gate and then let all the