New Zealand - Tauranga

On arrival in Tauranga, we were met by a bout of poor weather. Unfortunately this wasn’t the only negative thing about our time in Tauranga. When arriving in every new place it has taken some time for us to adapt to the difference- settling in an area we enjoy and then moving on leaves us judging the new town/city on the strengths of the last area but given a short amount of time we begin to accept the new area for whatever it is and what it has to offer. However we never received a positive vibe from Tauranga, the city itself (no offence to the inhabitants of Tauranga) was very bland and I kept striking similarities with Gloucester in the UK, which is incidentally one of the areas of my home country I really do not like. We also found the city to be the most unclean area we had found along our travels in NZ to date.

Anyhow I don’t want to sound like we are complaining too much, so I shall move onto the actual trip report.

We arrived mid afternoon from Coromandel town, we spent the majority of the afternoon getting our bearings and sipping coffee in a café along the strand; a long strip in Tauranga packed with cafés, restaurants and bars. Our evening went by pretty fast and feeling completely unmotivated to cook anything we decided to take the chance to pop out for a meal, we headed down to Zeytin- a modern Turkish restaurant who use original clay ovens to cook the food… unfortunately and here come’s another complaint, our food sounded much better on the menu than it actually was.

Our second day and only full day in Tauranga started in a much similar way to that of the first- very dreary weather. Our first port of call was Mt Managuanui, the walk up the mountain takes approximately an hour return but then we did take the difficult track, I believe the intermediate track adds another 20 minutes or so to the walk and I would presume it’s a lot easier. The walk was quite hard, obviously all uphill and a lot of steps. Once at the top you are rewarded with panoramas of the surrounding areas; cue pictures (shame it wasn’t a clear day)!




After our trek we decided to head down to the hot salt water pools at the bottom; this is a great thing to do after the walk. The pools are outdoors and temperatures range from 37 to 40 degrees Celsius, which bestows a very strange feeling in you, especially when it’s drizzling and the prevailing winds are quite cold and yet your amazingly warm. Our evening was spent with a visit to a cinema that I cannot remember the name of; though it officially had the most comfortable seats I have ever sat on. Oh, an we watched Up! Which to anyone is interested is without a doubt the best Pixar film to date.

Hoping the weather will get better, our next destination involves heading south to Rotorua.