Sand, Surf & Spirits - Cape Reinga
Twelve degrees below the Tropic of Capricorn, Te Aupouri Peninsula thrusts its gritty mountainous head north to bask in subtropical sunlight.
Here under the watchful gaze of the wind-whipped Cape Reinga lighthouse, the Tasman and Pacific meet, colliding in a fit of fury and spitting salty spray high as they battle for dominance.
Cape Maria van Dieman
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Eerie and unforgettable, magical and entrancing, the Far North of New Zealand casts a spell on those who venture here to the meeting place of two worlds as powerfully real as these two mighty oceans.
Maori believe that at Cape Reinga, "the place of the leaping", the spirits of the departed leap from an 800-year-old pohutukawa tree on the windswept cape to begin the voyage back to their final resting place in the ancestral homeland of Hawaiki.
According to legend, spirits begin their passage to the afterlife at Ninety Mile Beach, and no trip to Cape Reinga in this lifetime is complete without travelling one-way via Ninety Mile Beach’s sand highway, entering or exiting on Te Paki Stream. This magnificent beach arches in an unbroken stretch of white sand for some 88 km and is flanked by the Aupouri Forest, a Narnia-like place where bands of wild horses roam free amid legends of thoroughbreds and a shipwreck lost in the mists of time.
Te Paki Dunes
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Old boogie-boards become slick toboggans on Te Paki’s golden dunes while on the east coast a sparkling white sand dune containing some of the world’s purest silica marks the entrance to Parengarenga Harbour. It is here in early March that godwits gather, covering the dune in a vast seething black cloud like the manifestation of the spirits further north, before leaping off to embark on their own great migration to the frozen climes of Siberia and Alaska.
At the southern most end of the silica sand, pristine Rarawa Beach swells for what seems like a moment to accommodate an annual surfing competition and then just as quickly subsides back into a timeless unspoilt desolate beauty, untouched except for the occasional fisherman and a sleepy DOC campsite waiting to enchant the unsuspecting visitor. Nearby Henderson Bay is a shell collectors’ paradise, with magical views to Kari Kari, languid seals basking on sunbaked rocks, and surfcasters dozing on long lines against the dark smudge of North Cape on a perfect horizon.
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