We arrived to an Airbnb in Tauranga last night, it was a beautiful little one room cottage newly built on a small farm. Yanmei got a few fresh eggs from the chickens.
The next morning we headed to Mount Maunganui, which is a very small mountain on the coast at the tip of the peninsula. We could see it from our room (on the right, below).
It is part of the Bay of Plenty and is a popular beach destination, especially now in the summer. Hiking up Mt Maunganui is one of the top recommendations on TripAdvisor.com for North Island, so that was our goal.
First we took a few photos in the harbor.
Our host recommended we start early because it gets hot, but of course we didn’t listen and started our hike at 10am, and it was starting to get warm, although is was partially overcast as you can see from the pictures. The hike was moderately challenging. Yanmei really enjoyed the views and wants to come back.
We made it to the summit in a bit over an hour, then headed back down a different route. As we got closer to the beach we could see there was lots of activity.
We had lunch and then headed to our next stop: Taupo. Taupo is a large lake in the center of North Island. They call it the Great Lake. It was about 160km. Shortly into the drive it started to downpour rain, and there was some lightning and a few big cracks of thunder.
After the initial downpour, the rain eased up and after about half an hour it was over. We got to Taupo safely and checked into another good Airbnb picked by Yanmei, with a little bit of a lake view. After resting a bit we decided to check out Huka Falls, which was okay, but we’ve seen a lot of great waterfalls, so…
More interesting to me was this sign:
It’s the first “no drones” sign I’ve seen. I bet they will become a lot more common in the next few years. Anyway after that we headed back to our room for the night and there was a pretty go sunset from our view.
David