Whitianga

With the car stereo playing Tom Waits’s Foreign Affairs, I set off from Auckland, heading east along the Hauraki Gulf, aiming for two days of exploration on the Coromandel Peninsula.

Lonely Planet promised white-sand beaches, abandoned gold mines, and large tracts of untamed bush. Reading up at the youth hostel the night before, it was especially the far north of the region that caught my attention.

After a day on the road, I must say that New Zealand has been everything I – and a few hundred thousand Germans – have dreamt of. South of Colville, I found a pristine beach where I simply could not resist a skinny dip, suddenly and completely alone. With the water temperature well above 20 degrees, I felt almost guilty, thinking of the season back in Sweden...

Otherwise, this is the first time since my solo adventures along the Jersey Shore in January that I have driven hundreds of kilometres on my own. Despite the constant “active driving” along winding switchbacks, the solitude leaves me in a reflective mood as the day draws to a close here on the Pacific shore in Whitianga.