Giveaways
Revised with new material and divided into two parts on 2 December 2022, and again on 13 August 2024 to note the closure of the Mill Creek Bird Park and Animal Encounters facility.
THE Coromandel Peninsula sits east of Auckland, on the far side of the Hauraki Gulf. Generally known just as the Coromandel for short, the peninsula’s not really on the way to anywhere else.
So, you have to make a special trip. And it’s really rugged, mostly covered in forested mountains with a low density of population.
To get to the Coromandel from Auckland, you can either drive around the sizable Hauraki (‘north wind’) Gulf or catch a ferry from downtown Auckland to Coromandel town. It’s also possible to fly.
The peninsula’s largest town, Thames, has seven and a half thousand permanent inhabitants. In total, only about fifty thousand people live permanently in the whole of the area shown in the next map, hand-drawn for this post. And that’s even though, as you can see from the scale down the bottom, the peninsula is quite large.
All of this makes the Coromandel a top holiday destination and hippie hangout! The more so because the peninsula is really scenic, with a ton of lonely beaches and offshore islands, as well as inland tramping (hiking) tracks.
Though there are only fifty thousand in winter, an influx of holidaymakers, mostly from Auckland, can push the Coromandel’s population past a hundred and thirty thousand in summer.
Three Māori iwi or tribes share the peninsula: the Ngāti Whanaunga, the Ngāti Maru and the Ngāti Tamaterā. These are three of the five iwi of the Maruatūahu group or super-tribe which takes its name from Maruatūahu, a joint ancestor. There are about ten thousand Marutūahu today all told.
Moehau, a prominent mountain which watches over the tip of the peninsula, is sacred to the Maruatūahu, who have interred many rangatira and ariki, or chiefs of different degree, on its top.
And not only Maruatūahu chiefs. The name Moehau is short for Te Moengahau-o-Tamatekapua, ‘the windy sleeping-place of Tamatekapua’, an ancestor of the Rotorua-based Arawa iwi who is also said to be buried there.
The peninsula has two Māori names, Te Tara-o-te-Ika a Māui (the jagged barb of Māui’s fish, a reference to the stingray-like shape of the North Island), and Te Paeroa-a-Toi (Toi’s long mountain range).
This information comes from the educators Charmaine Pountney and Tanya Cumberland, who describe some additional Māori names, to which I have added hyperlinks, as with the above:
"Whitianga: Te Whitianga-a-Kupe (Kupe’s crossing)
"Mercury Bay: Te Whanganui-a-Hei (the great harbour of Hei)
"Hauraki Gulf: Tīkapa Moana (an allusion to ceremonies designed to protect Tainui and Te Arawa tribes, which took place at a small island off Cape Colville known as Tīkapa or Takapū, which means gannet)."
An interactive graphic on Te Ara, the online Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, provides a map you can mouse over or touch for a range of Māori place names of the Coromandel Peninsula.
As for the name Coromandel, this comes from India, strangely enough. The original Coromandel is a section of south-east Indian coastline after which several British ships have also been named. In 1820, exactly two hundred years ago, HMS Coromandel stopped in at the harbour of the future township of Coromandel to pick up kauri logs for masts. The current name of the peninsula either comes from that Coromandel, or a later immigrant ship of the same name.
In the remainder of this post, I describe a visit to the northern part of the peninsula in November 2022, from Mill Creek just southwest of Whitianga northward toward its tip. In next week’s post, I describe the southern part of the peninsula.
From Thames, where I often visit my father, I drove north along the west coast past Tapu and Waiomu, which I will write about next week, to Coromandel town, where HMS Coromandel loaded logs two hundred years ago.
Coromandel town is where you can arrive by ferry from Auckland. An ideal way to explore the Coromandel would be to take an EBike over on the ferry from Auckland.
Coromandel town is famous for its picturesque appearance and generally laid-back quality. There are also lots of bushwalks nearby.
While I was in Coromandel town in 2020, I visited the Driving Creek Railway, a bush tramway built by the late potter Barry Brickell, and also hiked the Kauri Block Track to the Pā Lookout. The word pā traditionally meant a fortified or village, usually on top of a hill. And that was true of this pā site, which has excellent views over Coromandel town’s harbour (with more islands!). Views from the Pā Lookout are included in a video that I will include in next week’s post.
I took a road from Coromandel town that I hadn’t taken before. It was the alternative route from Coromandel town to Whitianga, a narrow, 22-km gravel road called the 309 Road. There were pig farms along the road and signs saying not to feed the pigs, one of which I saw wandering across the road. It belonged to some strange, ancient-looking spotted breed and might have been wild I suppose. It was a fairly wild place!
The ‘309’ isn’t a highway number but simply the road’s name. According to the Wikipedia entry on the 309 Road, as of 2 Dec. 2022, “There are two theories as to how it got its name: one is that there are 309 bends in the road, the other is that horse-drawn coaches used to take 309 minutes to travel it.”
There’s an interesting waterfall along the 309 Road called the Waiau Falls.
I was heading toward Whitianga because I had discovered Mill Creek Bird & Animal Encounters on Airbnb, a wildlife park where you could formerly stay in cabins for only NZ $40 a night. To get there, you don’t go all the way to Whitianga from Coromandel town but turn right at the end of the 309 Road onto the main highway (SH25), and then right again up Mill Creek Road, which you come to after a few kilometres heading southward on SH25.
Update 13 August 2024: Regrettably, the Mill Creek Bird Park & Animal Encounters facility has closed permanently. They were planning to upgrade their cages but it looks like the cost of that and, probably, the impact of Cyclone Gabrielle, has rendered everything uneconomic.
The wildlife park was a 2014 Supreme Award winner from Rankers. I met the host, a man named Graham. He offered me dinner that night, Spaghetti Bolognese, which I thought was great. And I had my own double bed and cabin. Outside was a shared kitchen area and a lovely place to sit by outside tables.
Graham bought the place only six months before I visited. Because of Covid, it was no longer a commercial concern. All the same, he had four hundred birds, which he had to feed at the cost of a hundred dollars a day. And he had a python-like eel named Kelly, which, he said, was eighty years old. Kelly has blue eyes and a piercing gaze.
Kelly belongs to a seldom-seen species called the New Zealand long-finned eel (Anguilla dieffenbachii). The very biggest of the old timers of this variety apparently used to weigh in at 45 kg.
There probably aren’t any that are that big now. But I bet that’s where the Māori legend of the tāniwha, solitary water monsters that are the guardians of various bodies of water and spots along rivers, comes from. In other words, tāniwha are real and I’ve got a photograph of one to prove it.
Sadly, one day, Kelly will swim away to Tonga to mate and die. There were a few other eels in the creek; Graham fed them all dog food.
Many cockatiels and macaws had been acquired by the park, and there were a lot of ring-necked parakeets that made terrible noises. And there were a couple of turtles and some emus.
Graham wanted the place to be self-sufficient in terms of food since it wasn’t making so much money anymore and because he wanted to live somewhere self-sufficient in any case. So, he had begun farming cattle on the site in addition to all the birds and eels. He was semi-retired before, but now he was a great host and loved his work.
Here’s a video I made of Mill Creek. The show's star, at least in terms of scene-stealing, was a really cute Little Corella, a kind of miniature cockatoo, called Lalah.
I’ve always wanted to drive up to Port Jackson, at the peninsula's northern end, which can only be reached from the west coast. So, I doubled back to the west coast from Whitianga.
You get to Port Jackson via Colville, north of Coromandel town on the west coast. Luckily, you don’t have to take the 309 Road west from Whitianga unless you want to. There are sealed roads between Coromandel town, Whitianga and Colville as well.
Perhaps because it is such a far retreat, Colville hosts the Mahamudra Buddhist Centre.
The next stop after Colville was the Macdonald Recreation Reserve, which is a nice freedom camping area. And then Fantail Bay, a fully serviced campsite a few kilometres south of Port Jackson.
I spent a couple of nights at Fantail Bay, which has a short walking track, the Fantail Bay Track, which leads inland to a height of 320 metres and mainly exists so that you can look out over the sea from that height.
There are heaps more tracks at the very northern end of the peninsula, from Port Jackson, where there is another campsite. They include the Muriwai Walk, which runs mostly along ridges above the coast; the Coromandel Coast Walkway; the Sugar Loaf; the Stony Bay Mountain Bike Track, and an inland hike to the top of an unnamed peak 708 metres high.
The highest peak on the Coromandel, Mt Moehau, is in this area. Mount Moehau is 892 metres high. You can climb nearly to the top via a rough and dubious track from Stony Bay, too hazardous to risk in wet weather and cloud, to a place called the Moehau Saddle. But not all the way because the ancient graveyard for Māori chiefs lies beyond the saddle.
The Coromandel Coast Walkway and the Stony Bay Mountain Bike Track lead from Jackson Bay to Stony Bay on the peninsula's east coast. From there, the road leads to Port Charles and from Port Charles to Waikawau, or you can take a coastal trail from Port Charles to Waikawau.
You can go around the coast from Port Jackson by car as far as Fletcher Bay, but there were a couple of fords, and because it was raining by the time I got to Port Jackson the fords were quite deep. I’d already written a car off once by attempting to drive through deep water in the South Island, so I didn’t want to risk it a second time.
Nor did I climb Mount Moehau, even though I wanted to, because the weather was now too bad to risk the track to the Moehau Saddle, and I probably would not have had a view anyway.
The next time I revisit the northern Coromandel, I will do so when the weather is good enough to climb Mount Moehau. And I will take in the wonderful Waikawau Bay Campsite on the east coast of the peninsula, as well.
I went swimming in Whitianga, and I’ve taken photos of Whitianga and its ferry and waterfront. They had the Beach Hop festival at Whangamatā down the coast, with some of the events spilling over to Whitianga.
The name Whitianga, or Te Whitianga-Nui-a-Kupe in its long form, the great crossing of Kupe, means that it is the spot where the navigator Kupe, who in Māori tradition led the original voyage by which Aotearoa New Zealand was discovered, made landfall and established a local base of operations. By tradition, Kupe’s voyage occurred around 950 CE, a few centuries before the Māori arrived in really large numbers.
A stream that winds through the town is named the Taputapuātea Stream, after the Taputapuātea Marae on the island of Ra‘iātea, which is where Kupe is said to have come from and which is now part of today’s French Polynesia. Much later, Captain Cook recruited his local navigator, Tupaia, from the same island. You can read more about those connections in an Otago Daily Times story called ‘Coromandel — Land of Kupe and Cook’.
To round off, here is a video I’ve made of northern Coromandel scenes, starting at Coromandel town and finishing at Whitianga.
The Complete Guide to Camping on the Coromandel (Thames-Coromandel District Council Brochure, September 2018 edition).
TheCoromandel.com. The Coromandel’s main tourism website, with a bit of a commercial and foodie bias.
Coromandel: Places to Go. The New Zealand Department of Conservation’s top-level webpage on the Coromandel. This page is oriented toward the outdoors and things you can do for free and is therefore complementary to TheCoromandel.com.
Next week, I will describe the southern part of the peninsula. If you like this account of my adventures on the Coromandel, you might also be interested in my book The Neglected North Island: New Zealand’s Other Half.
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