I Like it Hot Hot Hot

It should be noted that I didn't actually take any of these photos in this post. My friend Elysse let me use her's for a small royalty fee of a few hundred dollars.

Our second day in Coromandel actually turned out to be a little bit of a downer compared to the previous, but was fun nonetheless. We finished off our first day with Elysse and I entertaining with some singing and guitar on the beach. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but this is a somewhat standard tradition of our group- cracking open some beverages of sorts and singing wildly at the top of our lungs like 14-year old girls at a Backstreet Boys concert. It was my first time ever playing on the beach and it was liberating to able to play and sing while the water washed in and the stars shone like billions of fireflies. Even at one point the cops stopped over, and while we thought we were done for, they merely stated that they were bored and heard the music. It was a good night.

So when I say the next day was a downer, it probably had to do with the fact we woke up to rain and that yesterday had been so awesome. But when did a little rain ever stop anyone? We still found some ways to entertain ourselves including some movies, games, shell picking and a swim at the beach where we later realized we weren’t suppose to be swimming.

The real highlight of the day came when we headed to the Hot Water beach later in the evening. The idea of the Hot Water beach is to dig a hole in the sand 2 hours on either side of low tide and the warm ground would heat the ocean water that trickled in from the receding waves. Essentially you make your own personal hot tub. I imagine this happens because of some extremely complicated geo-thermal phenomenon. I might have wikipediaed it if my curiosity was as burning as the water in our hole, but it wasn’t.

While neat and interesting, its novelty wore out pretty fast for me. So when everyone labored away digging a giant hot tub Brain and I snuck off to build a sweet sand castle on top of a giant rock. It was truly a magnificent fortress complete with walls, towers, a light house, a causeway up the rock, and most importantly tiny little sand sheep. We are in New Zealand of course. We then made our way back to the group where the giant hot tub was completed and shared a small laugh that while we were having fun building a castle, everyone else had been digging a giant hole in the ground. The water was easily hot enough to make some hot chocolate; though I doubt sea salt with a hint of chocolate would taste very good.

The rain once again came and we made our way back to our hostel. The rest of the night was spent listening to a pretty decent cover band at one of the bars and then getting some shut-eye.