Days 1-5: Ninety Mile Beach, Zero Day in Kaitaia

We've completed the first 100km if the trail!  Only 2900 more to go... 

I'm writing this post from my phone, and having quite a hard time dealing with formatting and pictures, so bear with me a bit. I seem to be stuck with center justification, and I can't seem to put pictures inline with text, or caption them. Bummer. Hopefully I will figure out a better way to do this, but until then,  forgive me, graphic design friends. 

We left Auckland early on Friday the 25th on an InterCity bus to Kaitaia. We stayed that night at a hostel called Mainstreet Lodge. It's apparently a working hostel - it is filled with young Germans who are staying for multiple months, and working on nearby farms to pay for their travels. It's very clean, and Mike, the owner, is friendly and helpful.

We were hoping to find a cheap way up to Cape Reinga, our starting point, but unfortunately our only options were hitchhiking or paying for a full day bus tour and ditching it when it gets to the cape. We opted for the bus tour - I'm sure we'll end up hitching, but starting right off with a 100+ km ride was a little intimidating. 

The bus tour turned out to be fun - we drove up the beach, which was a little depressing/scary, because we drove fast and were on it for a loooong time. It was also helpful because we got to scout out water sources. At one point the bus stopped at some giant sand dunes, and we got to slide down them on little sleds. After lunch, we got to the cape, collected our packs, and headed down to the lighthouse, the official starting point.

A few pictures and a bit of repacking later, we were on our way. We hit our first snag of the trip only a few kms in, when we came across some rocks on the beach that we couldn't cross at high tide. We were almost resigned to wait a few hours for the tide to go down, when Liz found a tiny rough "trail" that went up and over a large hill, avoiding the rocks entirely. It was a nice little confidence booster - getting foiled by the trail in the first hour would have taken some wind out of our sails, but instead we traded a couple high fives and kept going. We camped that night at the south end of Twilight Beach, at a very nice DOC campsite with a gazebo.

The next day, we came upon Ninety Mile Beach, which is only actually about 52 miles long. That's ok though, 52 miles is plenty of beach. We spent the next 3 days walking down it, and had great fun playing games such as "will the bird poop before flying away?" "what time will the first tour bus pass us?" and "how many shells can you stab in a row with your hiking pole?" 

As you probably guessed, the beach was fairly uninteresting for the most part. Offshore currents apparently carry most things north around the top of the island, so there wasn't even much washed up on shore. There were a few highlights though: a pack of wild horses! a baby seal! dead pufferfish, and dead bluebottle jellyfish. Also, the weather was great - sunny, not too hot, no rain.

We camped behind the dunes the first night, and at Hukatere Lodge, a small place just off the beach, the next night. Our host at Hukatere was great - he gave us a warm cup of tea when we got there, and offered us fresh eggs for breakfast the next morning. We also heard lots of interesting stories about his years in western Australia. 

On day 4 we FINALLY reached the end of the beach, and exited into the small town of Ahipara. It seemed that the town has seen better days - lots of houses for sale. We had a bite at a cafe, then mentally prepared for our first hitchhike, back to Kaitaia. 

All the nervousness was for nothing - after we stuck our thumbs out, the first car that went by stopped and picked us up. A nice girl that had just spent the day surfing gave us a ride back to the Mainstreet Lodge in her van.

Back in Kaitaia, we got some dinner, slept for 10 hours, then spent our zero day (meaning we hiked zero miles) with food shopping, email writing, laundry, and resting our feet. Liz has a sizable blister on one foot that we're hoping will heal up before we had into the wet and muddy forests for the next section.

So far we're really enjoying ourselves. I did wake up at one point last night thinking "I'm 31 years old, unemployed, and sleeping in a hostel in New Zealand with a bunch of 20 year old Germans... what am I doing???" But I got over that pretty quickly. Tomorrow we catch a ride back to Ahipara to pick up the trail for a 5-6 day section that should be the exact opposite of the beach - thick, muddy, wet, overgrown forests. It will definitely be a nice change of pace!