Week 3 - 6 Oct - Smoked Mussels

We walked to the down town of Coromandel for coffee today and had the best "flat white" ever. Alan also enjoyed a caramel, ginger, coconut crumble square, which was terrific.

Mussels and Oysters are farmed locally on the coast. We picked up garlic smoked mussels for lunch...but ended up having them with dinner. They were so good, we are going to pick up more tomorrow with perhaps a bit of smoked fish. Alan made us scrambled eggs with gluten free ham and sheep cheese - delicious. We have enjoyed the citrus that is ripe on the trees. Here at The Loft there are lemons, tangellos and grapefruit available.

Spent the afternoon at Driving Creek Railway. This railway took us up into the hills with switch backs, zigzags and three tunnels. It was tortuous narrow gage railway track over ravines with high double deck viaduct (bridge) The area is renouned for its unusual pottery. The pottery is made from the clay banks in the area. The railway was originally built to bring clay down off the hills. Over the years the banks have been shored up with bottles and clay.

Had a chat with Annette and Tim, the owners of The Loft, where we are staying. Annette took me off to see the most amazing doll studio and jewelery shop. Lorraine Abernethy is an exquisite fiber artist. Her latest doll, Strelitzia Fuoco, is featured in Patti Culea's latest book- 'Creative Cloth Doll Beading'. I have never seen such intricate artistic dolls,truly inspring.

Tim also directed us to a very scenic walk. We drove down highway 309, a very narrow, but scenic gravel highway that connects the west coast to the east coast on the Coromandel Penninsula. It was very narrow with lots of truck on it. We also found loose cattle around one of the bends. We went to the Walau Falls. The bottom of the falls is a swimming hole in warmer weather. This is a very pretty spot set in an all natural forest. Many of the forests are replanted with Pine trees as the natural trees were clear-cut.

Next, we stopped at the Kauri Grove. It was 8 km from the beginning of the road. My first chance to breath, as it was even more windy than the coastal road. Here we hiked in to see 13 massive Kauri trees. There are few left on the island as they were exported to other countries between 1880 and 1930 they were logged from this coast. These are long lived trees with the oldes tree in the grove being 600 years old and 1.9 m in diameter. They are quite tall with the first branch beginning at 16 m. The biggest Kauri ever measured had a girth of 20 m.