The best way to get to New Zealand’s “Hot Water Beach” is stick out an index finger
The best way to get to New Zealand’s “Hot Water Beach” (North Island, Coromandel Peninsula) is to stick-out an index finger “Downunder”-style (forget the thumb)--safe enough on an island idyll pasturing more sheep than people. A large Maori, with tattoos and a good-luck greenstone amulet around his neck, at last pulls over. Then off down scenic State Highway 25, you speed toward a crossing point with epiphany and serendipity, until you get to, er, a thermal beach!
On “Hot Water Beach,” a volcanic sandtrap, all you need to do is dig holes in the sand, which fill up with hot water (just like a regular bathtub or Jacuzzi) at a rate of 15 liters per minute, and at temperatures of up to 64 C (147 F). With an alchemical mix of salt, calcium, magnesium, potassium, fluorine, bromine, and silica, the otherworldly hot springs resemble gigantic glasses of Pellegrino, a thirst-quencher for Polynesian gods. Luxuriating in your private “pool,” you stare out at the endless horizon of ocean spinning out of control, wobbling like a vinyl 33 rpm record.
Ah, bliss! Oh, oblivion! The Maori passes you a (legal) spliff of some native plant and says, “Better than Mowee Wowee”—whatever that is. Manhattan is too far away to exist—imagine: an island without any beaches or volcanos? Yet this Oceania innocent wants to know , “Do you know any movie stars?!” Yep. But impossible New Zealand actually exists and was the basis for Samuel Butler’s Erewon, an anagram for “Nowhere.”
At the Brian Boru Hotel, a very British-style “public house” (inn), your new Maori friend, the owner, rewards you with a free room and a meal of moist lamb, mushy peas, and frosty mugs of Steinlager beer. “My ancestors arrived in ‘Aoteara’ (Land of the Long White Cloud) in an armada of canoes,” the Maori says eating a feijoa (similar to a kiwi but sweeter). His accent is influenced by the alien endemic languages of birds. “Then we hunted the Moa, so they are now extinct, just like the Dodo!”
Brian Boru Hotel
200 Richmond Street
Thames Thames-Coromandel
Waikato, NZ
The Moa, the largest flightless land bird to ever walk the earth, upwards of eight feet tall, was written about in Mark Twain’s Following the Equator, and was reputedly more delicious than Popeye’s. Washing the siren spit out of your matted mane, you catch some kip (sleep), amazed at how in the upside-down Antipodes, the seasons are reversed and water spins counterclockwise down the drain. . . .
Brian Boru Hotel
200 Richmond Street
Thames Thames-Coromandel
Waikato, NZ
Tel (07) 868-6523, Fax (07) 868-9760
