sandboarding, 64-not-90-Mile-Beach and Cape Reinga

My main aim in Paihia is to go on the day-trip to Cape Reinga and 90 Mile Beach. I take the trip run by AwesomeNZ, and our driver turns out to be a very cool Maori guy called Barry. The trip takes you through some of the more northern Northland towns, on a visit to the Kauri forest, where we creep around almost in silence, over-awed by the gigantic, ancient kauri trees which tower over us. Then we drive on to 90 Mile Beach, a massive stretch of beach which is defined as a 'recreational highway', which means that taxed and WOF-ed (like an MOT) vehicles can drive on it. There's a speed limit of 80km/hr. The beach is not 90 Miles long, incidentally, and the tour guides seem to get some relish out of disabusing us of the fact. It's actually around 64 Miles long, and the reasons for the mistake - ranging from the fact that '90 Miles sounds better', to the disparity of the seamen using nautical rather than land Miles, to their making an estimate of the distance they could travel over 3 days, 90 Miles, and christening the beach without checking their calculations, are myriad. But it seems pretty irrelevant when you're driving along the beach, watching the surf flash past on one side, and the dunes on the other.

Another - very New Zealand - attraction of the area around 90 Mile Beach is sandboarding. It involves taking a boogie-board, climbing up a giant sandune, lying face-forward on the boogie-board, pushing off down the slope and, possibly, praying or yelling out expletives as the momentum gathers and you either slide safely all the way to the bottom, with an added aquaplane across a muddy sand-dune stream, or bail out on-purpose or by accident, eating copious amounts of sand as you roll, boardless to stop. It's fun! More fun obviously when you don't eat the sand - or stop yourself with your actual head, as I saw one girl do (she made that her first and last attempt)
Even Barry has a go, though,as he points out: "As you can see I only went down once. Do I LOOK like an [idiot] to you?!"

From the Giant Dunes we drive on to a quiet beach. It's quiet because everyone else packed off when it started to rain. We wait, oh, maybe five minutes, and the sun is shining again, almost uncomfortably hot! Tut, silly other tourists who haven't worked out NZ's ninja weather yet. We have lunch on the beach, and then have to be practically dragged back onto the (it's a really beautiful beach!) bus to head off to Cape Reinga.

Cape Reinga is a very sacred Maori site - it is known is Maori as Te Rerenga Wairua, 'the leaping-off place of spirits', and it is where spirits are beleived to come to enter the underworld, by climbing down the roots of a 800-year-old tree on one of the rocky outcrops of the Cape. Barry explains to us that it customary for Maori families to visit Cape Reinga to bid farewell to their dead loved ones, explaining that a visit to Cape Reinga some years ago had helped him in some ways face the grief of losing his young son in a car-accident.

The Cape is also where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific, resulting in an incongruous line of surf, or tidal race, in the middle of the calm sea off the North-West side of the Cape. The Maori people see the two seas as the sea of Rehua (male) and the sea of Whitirea (female).

It's a beautiful spot, though it's hard to feel any significance in the area without a greater understanding of Maori beliefs. Still it strikes me as pretty beautiful and appropiate place to 'farewell' dead relatives, whatever your beliefs.

Our return from Cape Reinga is a long drive, punctuated by as visit to a Kauri showroom where there are myriad products carved from ancient swamp kauri, dug up, preserved, from Northland swamps, and to the 'famous' Mongonui fush'n'chup shop.

written by  LizIsHere on April 24, 2010 from Cape Reinga, New Zealand
from the travel blog: New Zealand & Australia 2010
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