Although Tauranga is my home town, and I love the place, it is still, as far as you, the touring visitor is concerned, just another traffic-clogged city boasting of one of the most popular beaches in the country and a trio of great 18-hole golf courses with a couple more just outside the city boundary.
It's major attraction, the Mount Maunganui cut-off cone rising straight out of the sea for most its girth, becomes a dominant back-drop to visiting the Mount Maunganui beach, taking a walk along the boardwalk promenade and then moving on.
You simple do not need to go looking for
the Mount, now to be known as Mauao. It can
be seen from almost every which-way in the
city or surrounding district. The "Mount"
just is. It deserves its icon status. You'll
be glad you saw it in passing.
Still, to put on rose-coloured glasses, the city does also have some most attractive shopping centres and, if you came visiting to enjoy our burgeoning variety of restaurant/bistro bars, then The Strand, leading off The Mall in Downtown Tauranga could provide many a happy hour or day or two.
Mount Maunganui's shopping centre, just a minute or two's drive from the ocean or harbour beaches on either side, is also a delight to the shopping and food connoisseur. At the height of the season the entire city, including its roads and shopping centre footpaths, becomes a fun-filled mass of holidaying and partying humanity.
However, compared to Auckland's traffic problems, Tauranga is still just an oversized fishing village with New Zealand's largest export and rapidly becoming largest import port driving its insatiable, consumer-society growth - and therein lies the heart of the traffic problem. The bridge linking the two ports, one a container terminal, the other general cargo consisting largely of pine logs, and the two state highways feeding the ports, is, if nothing else, a remarkable example of engineering innovation.
When you drive, or crawl, across the bridge, consider the fact that its entire over-sea length, with its curve and rise and fall over the channel, was constructed on the Tauranga city-centre side of the harbour, then pushed in sections across pre-built columns. Consider also, that like my house on driven piles, it sits on mud. No rock foundation. In the construction stage some of the columns began to sink as the weight of the extending bridge bore down on them. Concrete grouting forced down the side and under the columns provided stable, localised foundations and so, 15 years later the bridge still stands/floats - as does our house!
Unless golfing and/or ocean swimming is your thing, then a day in Tauranga, and perhaps an overnight stop-over in one of the city's many quality hotels, motels, holiday parks and motor camps should satisfy your curiosity.
Leaving Tauranga early morning will give you plenty of time to enjoy a couple of quite outstanding, and reasonably priced, tourist attractions on the way to the Rotorua Lakes and the country's top-of-the-pops Tourist Centre, Rotorua City itself.