Sandboarding and ninety mile beach
Trip Start
Jul 24, 2007
1
23
50
Trip End
Nov 11, 2007
Paiha,
New Zealand
Friday, September 28, 2007
Today we had an organised trip up to Cape Reinga which is the northern most point of New Zealand and as close to Australia as you can get from here. Its still over 18,600 KM from London though so don't think i'll be popping home anytime soon!
Bay of Islands
!Day was pretty cool - it was organised through Kiwi Experience but was actually with Awesome Adventures so we set of at 7am on the bright yellow bus. The driver decided to chat non stop for about an hour and a half telling Maori stories/legends and what places were etc (this part of New Zealand - the northlands is particularly rich in Maori Traditional and is one of the most sacred places for the maori people) but you know at 7am in the morning pretty much 90% of the bus was asleep!
We stopped at the Kauri Tree forest briefly on the way up - The Kauri Trees are the second largest tree known to man and some of these are around 2000 years old and they were huge both in height and girth and great to see although there was no need to hang around for long - it was freezing this morning....
We headed straight up to Cape Reinga which is a pretty amazing place (but really cold and windy as well) this is where the Tasman Sea and the South Pacific Ocean meet and although you can't like draw a line separating the two you can see where they meet because they both have different currents and this creates a white swirl which you can see on the pictures
View form the Hostel
. We stopped for lunch at a little bay called Tapotupotu Bay which was pretty, we had the option to swim but its was too cold to even consider taking clothes off!! The next stop was the sand boarding - I knew it was down sand dunes obviously but I never expected them to be so big. I have never seen anything like that before although I knew they existed so sand boarding was kinda scary - wasn't sure whether I would do it or not when I saw the dunes but Aspen went first and said it was great so thought I better give it a go - the hardest part was the walk up the sand to the top - man that was steep. Sometimes speeds can be up to 90km/per hour but it wasn't that fast today thank god!!! so it was an experience, not sure whether its something i'll ever want to repeat but I done it.... at least once!!
The coach then drove onto 90 mile beach which is an official highway on New Zealand and has the same rules as all other roads - its a long wide (when the tides out - it is too narrow to drive on when the tide is in) beach but it was pretty cool to be in a coach driving down it although its not really that eventful. They use a really unique way of fishing from the beach here - they actually attach their lines to kites which they then let go out as far to sea as possible and they have some contraption that lets them drop the hooks down (i don't know the details) its so they can let their lines go out far enough for the deep drop in the ocean bed which attracts bigger fish (something to do with the tectonic plate and a fault line which runs all the way down the west coast of New Zealand) - pretty good day and on the way home we stopped to get fush and chips from the local shop mmmmmm....
Comments
hi ya x
hi boyce, it's sounds like you're having a really good time, you sound really chilled out, and the places look so lovely. wish i could jump on a plane and come and see you!! (if only it was that simple!) miss ya loads xxxxx