A nagging problem which has dogged me my entire life: I have a hard time holding onto myself when constantly in company. Dreamt last night about feeling lost. I need to be alone sometimes, with a pen in my hand, or it all just rushes past.
But we're not going to see this child for as long as another year so I'm unable to break away from these group activities. Yesterday we saw one of the high point sights of the trip, Cathedral Cove.
In the 'cathedral' part of Cathedral Cove
To get to this sheer magnificence, Mr. Green drove us (on the left side of the road) up and over a considerable mountain (range) of hairpin curves for hours. After a long day of this and hiking, sometimes on steep terrain, for more than a couple of hours, we screeched to a stop on a hairpin turn at around 6PM (full darkness with our "shoulder monitor" shreiking "DAD" we drove within centimeters of a head-on with a sheer rock wall.
(The "shoulder monitor" is the person who sits next to the driver (the driver being new to left-hand driving) and calls out when the car is about to cross over the shoulder and into a culvert or to plunge down what New Zealand so charmingly refers to as a "steep bluff". I'd call them cliffs as they sometimes drop off hundreds of feet to the crashing sea.)
WIthout endangering my life, hard to show you how sheer the drop-off is behind me. Note tense body language.
I had the 'shoulder monitor' position for a while until removed from it by majority rule as my shreiks, loud gasping and frantic gesturing was determined more dangerous than the driving conditions.
On the path down to Cathedral Cove
The beach at Cathedral Cove
More at the beach at Cathedral Cove
We're staying in the beautiful and spotlessly clean Jacaranda Lodge just outside Coromandel town which has a famously delicious breakfast. Robin Munch has a gorgeous garden with seville orange, fig and macadamia nut trees and more, the names of which I'd never heard before (jacaranda, fejoia, etc). Robin bakes bread and makes preserves from these and serves eggs the color of orange marigolds from her hens as well as homemade muesli (sweetened and unsweetened). And she's lovely.
The garden at Jacaranda Lodge
It was almost 3PM by the time we left Cathedral Cove and decided against the borderline fast food café in the nearby town. When we'd just about given up on finding anywhere for lunch, we stumbled on this 'wood-fired pizza' place and had lunch outside. You can almost make out the tree laden with kiwi fruit hanging over the table. There were also trees full of persimmons and tiny birds.
