love me some coromandel ♥

This weekend I spent three days in the most beautiful place I've ever seen in my whole entire life. We camped with the Joseph family in Coromandel, which is on the east coast of New Zealand. I know people exaggerate all the time, but if there is one time I'm not exaggerating, this would be it. The whole time I was there I felt like I walked into a postcard or a desktop background.

We took off right after school Friday and piled all 20 girls into two vans to drive for 4 hours. We got there right as the sun was setting and we went a little camera happy.

Friday morning, bright and early, a small group of us got up before sunrise to go fishing. We didn't really know what we were getting into - they just told us to bring our swimsuits. I thought we were going to be fishing on a boat, but we were actually setting up nets and diving for sea urchins and paua shells! The water was freezing . . . I have never been so cold in my whole life (they ran out of wetsuits and I got shafted). We gathered a whole bag of sea urchins and shells and watched the sun come up. I was in shock, both from the cold and the view! I had never seen anything so beautiful in my whole life.

body glove's next hottest model

completely numb and frozen

so happy to be back in sweats

Then we spent the whole entire day at the beach. heaven. on. earth. I took a nap on the beach and ate lots of junk food. Then went ocean kayaking and surfing for the first time. Can't say I'm a pro, but I did get up a couple times!

That night we cut up the urchins and paua shells. Brother Joseph scraped out the "good part" of the urchin and had me eat it. nasty texture. Turns out it was the tongue!

Feeling brave after eating urchin tongue, I tried a bit of paua shell. We helped scrape out the insides, remove the guts, and cut out the teeth. shells have teeth! Then the meat was put into a grinder and then heated up into a type of stew. It tasted like ocean hamburger helper.

The Josephs were so kind to let us come along on their camping trip - they are the best family. The next coming adventure starts tomorrow morning at 5am! There is a taxi picking us up at our house to take us to the airport to travel to the South Island. We will be there for 10 days visiting Queenstown and Christchurch. I won't have any internet, so no pictures for a bit! I have heaps of pictures I need to post though, so I'll go a little facebook/blog crazy when I get back. cheers!