AS A callow stripling I once holidayed with family friends at Coopers Beach on the Far North east coast. (As an indication of how long ago, I heard that I had passed the old School Certificate exams while camped at the Coopers Beach camping ground ... by telegram!)
Non-existent now, the camp ground covered several acres and was packed with tents, caravans, and human campers of all sizes and denominations. The camp was next to what was — and still is — the lay-by with the sprinkling of local shops. The year we were there, a local entrepreneur doing the rounds with a movie projector and portable screen set up shop one evening on the road of the lay-by itself. Unfortunately, the technicolour movie — Elvis's Viva Las Vegas, from memory — wasn't designed for the dimensions of the smallish portable screen. Some interesting distortions resulted. Elvis and his devilish pelvis strutted the streets of Vegas as a three-metre-tall mutant, vertically elongated like a house-of-mirrors casualty.
The grounds ran right down to the beach itself, with its renowned beach-long frontage of mature pohutukawa trees — a king-size dose of crimson during the annual Christmas flowering. Now, the original camp grounds are littered with McMansions bordering a sealed loop road, with nary a tent in sight.
A few kilometres north was the beach-side settlement of Taipa, also fronting on to Doubtless Bay, but situated near the Taipa estuary. (The long single-lane Taipa Bridge was one of the northern bridges singled out for upgrading during the Northland by-election lolly scramble a few years back, but is still resolutely in singles mode, albeit now with temporary traffic lights.)
But back in the days, Taipa had even more capacious beach-side camping grounds, two or three times the acreage of the Coopers' ground. These also were packed to the gunnels over Christmas/New Year with happy campers and their multifarious temporary habitations. Again, pretty much all gone, with just a small rump of the original camp left by the estuary mouth.