Despite travelling the north island twice now, i’d surprisingly not made it to Cathedral Cove. It’s one of the most popular spots of NZ but i’d heard a lot of different rumours about its difficulty and thanks to the local doc guy stopping us for a chat (😅) we learnt some invaluable details that saved us time and money.

Thanks to Microsoft making everyone’s desktop backgrounds a shot of Cathedral Cove, it’s been a hotspot for tourists for a couple of years now. So much so, that they had to close off the local car park, and create a park and ride situation – which is not super obvious as the car park still shows up on google maps (but believe me, you can’t park there).

The car park is just on the way into Hahei, and runs from 9am – 6pm (details here). It was quiet when we went (in fact it was only us in the entire carpark) so we caught the first bus in, which was about a 10 minute journey & dropped us off right at the start of the walk.

The scenery was stunning even from the start, with views of the coastline and islands out to sea. The walk only took around 15 to 20 minutes, and was pretty much tarmac the entire way, with the exception of wooden steps when you reach the beaches. Depending on the tides, you could also stop off at a few different spots along the way such as Stingray bay and Gemstone bay, which even had a ‘diving trail’. These are only really possible to view at mid to low tide though, otherwise the sea pretty much hides the beach.

When we reached Cathedral Cove, I was expecting to see a heap of tourists down there with selfie sticks and cameras pointing in every direction, but we had the entire place to ourselves. It was absolutely insane to be in such a hotspot, with beautiful weather, and yet have it all to ourselves! We couldn’t have been luckier. If we had planned it better, we could have taken down a picnic & stayed down there for a good few hours, but we needed to stick to our time schedule anyway.

After our walk we headed back to Hahei and parked up by the beach, and Alesha somehow put together a 5 star salad for us to munch on in the sun. The sea was a bit calmer here so more suitable for a swim that the cove (which looked pretty gnarly).

It was hard to leave, but we figured we wanted to have as much time in Raglan as possible, so we decided to boost straight to raglan next, stopping off in Coromandel township for lunch. If we had more time we definitely would have loved to stay longer in this area, there’s so much to explore & especially on paddleboards! Maybe thats next summers plan? 😏

Have you ever been? What were your thoughts on the place?

Harriet 📸