We recently spent a week in that curious section of the country known as the Coromandel Peninsula. We’d been there before, but that was a long time ago and we were keen to see the changes.
Actually there were none.
Our first stop was Thames. Now this town I would describe as having shown little progress since the last century, but then I remembered that the last century was only fourteen years ago and that’s not going back nearly far enough. The verandas in the main street are still curved and corrugated and they all have veranda posts. Inside, the shops have those wonderful high ceilings with ornate plaster cornices. They’re probably miles from any earthquake fault lines so they’re no doubt thinking “why change?”
We had a meal one evening in the historic Junction Hotel, built in 1880 when the gold rush town had a population of eighteen thousand - now down to less the seven. In the interim the hotel has hardly changed from its original shape and form. The dining room was full to the brim and served a hearty meal at pre-second-millennium prices. We repaired to the bar afterwards and met some of the locals, mostly indigenees, who were overwhelmingly welcoming.
The one word I would use to describe Thames is “quaint.”
Next stop was Whangamata on the South-east coast and unknowingly we had occasioned our arrival during the week of their “Beach Hop.”
This is an annual event initiated in 2001 by the local Rock and Roll club and draws an estimated 30,000 visitors to the area. The “Hop” has become the largest specialty car show in New Zealand and the second largest Rock’n’roll festival in the Southern hemisphere.
Bill Haley Junior was there, but Richie Cunningham and The Fonz were conspicuous by their absence amongst this crowd determined to relive the happy days.
The cars took centre stage; over a thousand of them. There were hot rods with their superbly painted body’s just centimetres off the ground, sans their bonnets to reveal chrome-plated engines. Alongside these were the audacious American cars from the mid-fifties; gleaming often two-toned monsters, many with ostentatious tail fins. They were obviously made for the days when gasoline was a shilling a gallon.
Almost without exception these cars had steering column gear shifts and white vinyl bench front seats. Great for courting and even more sensible after you married the girl you courted and had four children. The youngest could always sit between mum and dad in the front.
Today’s bucket seats have meant less lust and smaller families.
The cars have fared better than their owners. Beer bellies on the men were the rule rather than the exception and before her tearful apology Rachel Smalley would probably have described many of the women as “lardo’s”.
Next stop, Coromandel’s jewel in the crown, Whitianga.
Whitianga was the antitheses of Whangamata with shopkeepers revealing that the place had actually gone backwards.
It seems that the young people who once used to flock there in droves have now found other paradises in which to holiday due in part to the fact that the camping grounds, always strategically placed, had all been sold off to developers who have built vast blocks of expensive holiday apartments.
Expensive to build perhaps, but not to stay in. We rented a luxury apartment for three nights for a comparatively modest sum.
We were told that sixty-three per cent of Whitianga’s population are absentee landowners. They drift in from Auckland and other parts of the world at the height of the summer spending their money in the trendy cafes or the supermarkets and the run-of-the-mill shopkeepers see little of the potential largesse.
The compact northern town of Coromandel was next on our journey; we stayed there and took potter Barry Brickell’s train to the top of the mountain. The train takes you through a replanted native Kauri forest and includes 2 spirals, 3 tunnels, 5 reversing points and several large viaducts and ends up at a structure called the “Eyeful Tower” which allows you a grand view of Auckland across the ocean. It traverses ravines that look frighteningly high and when the train driver tells you that Brickell built the viaducts himself you silently pray that he was as good an engineer as he is a potter.
The March weather was near perfect - autumn served up the summer we never had - but with the exception of beach hopping Whangamata the peninsula was largely bereft of people and we wondered where the reported ‘great increase in tourists’ are vacationing.
The answer to that was found when we overnighted at Rotorua on our way home.
The lakeside city is looking splendid; there wasn’t a curved corrugated veranda in sight and busloads of visitors disgorged at our hotel, most of them Asiatic in origin.
Rotorua has that unique advantage over the rest of the country in that you could break wind there and go completely unnoticed.
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