Left Orewa beach on the east coast and headed back across to the west coast to view the gannet colony at Muriwai beach. Did you know that the parent of the young birds stay behind while the young head off to Australia on their own? Wow but somehow not as impressive as the eels I'll tell you about in a mo!
After viewing gannets and appreciating the smell (ugh) we drove down to Piha beach. Before we got there we stopped at a little DOC site for a 2nd circular walk we found to Kitekite falls. Beautiful 40m waterfall with a pool at bottom that you could swim in (but not us - no kit and we had seen the eels!).
The eel are long finned eel and are threatened or endangered (can't remember which) but they swim here from Tonga at some point in their lives (can't remember if it's to spawn or after spawning) anyway there were some in the shallows of the pool which quite honestly were more interesting than swimming in the pool! Then walked up other side of waterfall and back down to car park. Very nice.
Quick stop at the beach to see Lion rock and have a paddle. Waded across stream to get to beach - following the people in front, quite deep bottoms of shorts bit soggy bit going for paddle anyway so never mind - on way back saw bridge, doh, used bridge!
Then on to Port Waikato for the night and laundry (very important as was wearing last pair of clean pants) phew - campsite had laundry. Set washing off and went for walk, up to look out, down to sand dunes (got a bit lost here) back to campsite via kids playground which had giant air pillow and no digs saying "kids only" (not that that would had made a difference). bounced around for a bit, washing into tumble dryer, walk to beach but slightly miss time things and just miss the sunset - ah well the bouncing on the air pillow was worth it!
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