Northland

From the Bay of Islands we drove north in direction Cape Reinga. We stopped at some interesting places such as a dry lake with fossiled Kauri trees (you'll here more about them later).


The plan was to drive up to Cape Reinga and down again in one day. But when we arrived at the 90 Mile Beach about a 100km from the cape it was already quite late in the afternoon and so we decided to stay and relax on the beach.

As we were now at the west coast we could enjoy our first sunset over the ocean. (veeerry romantic!)

On the next day we continued our journey. We made a first stop at the big sand dunes in the north of 90 Miles Beach. We rented two boggie bords (the nice lady in the shop stressed, that these were special bords for rides on the sand...) and slided the dunes down. It was quite steep (probably up to an angle of 40 degrees) and you could get really fast. It was great fun!

Finally we reached the cape and it was really a breathtaking landscape! It's a combination between cliffs and beaches and many green trees and busches of all sizes and forms. Besides that you can see the meeting point between the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean (in the picture left of Flo).

After that we drove south again and made only a quick stop at Rarawa Beach with its white silika sand (it's like snow but not as white as Whitehaven Beach). We drove on until we ended up in Opononi where we enjoyed another wonderful sunset.