Cape to Cape day twelve: Ahipara to Cape Reinga

Route
90 Mile Beach, Kauaeparaoa (or Te Paki) stream, connector road to SH1 to Cape Reinga, walk way to lighthouse (ridable).

Link to Map

Distance: 105 km

It’s pre-dawn (6am) as I head through the quite township and down Kaka Road to the beach.  It’s low tide and I’m aiming to get the 80 kms out of the way before the tide squeezes me up to the unridable soft sand.  Ideally I guess you would set off a couple of hours before low tide, but as it turns out I have heaps of time. After riding on the wet sand for a bit and covering self and bike in a slurry I find the sweet spot in the drier sand.   The 32cm tyres cope fine and the wind is kind, so I click along trying to ignore the heinous things that sand and salt might be doing to the moving parts on the bike.

There're bike shoes under there somewhere

The total traffic over the next four hours is five 4WDs, a parked station wagon with a couple of older chaps on deck chairs and two walkers with fifty kms of beach ahead of them.  The odd sea bird shadows the bike briefly but there is little else to remark on.

Sun rise provides the welcome distraction of trying to take photos without stopping ...

Yup - it's early

Looking forward ...

A more successful shot looking back ...

Bored and sweaty rider ...

Ooh look - something different ...

Half way - looking back

Half way - looking forward

The beach exit is reasonably easy to find but a quick check of the GPS on the phone (preloaded map) confirms it. There’s as much walking as riding up the stream and I come across a bogged van, but a 4WD is on the way and all I can do is commiserate.

At the road end I give the bike a good rinse down in the stream.  The local iwi have a truck selling cold drinks and renting sand boards for mucking about in the impressive dunes, the carpark is pumping.  A short hop up a gravel road then left onto SH1 for the final 16 hilly km to the lighthouse. Needless to say it’s hot and interminable.

The support crew are somewhere en route so I coast the bike down to the lighthouse amongst the crowds arriving at midday. I run off some photos for the record then sit and watch the wave patterns the two oceans create where they meet.

Where Tasman and Pacific meet.
Note the Pohutakawa on the headland

Last Light

Not the same bike but at least the luggage did the full trip
Three Kings Islands are out there somewhere

Yup - I made it too
(and no, that is not a lobotomy scar)

For the record ...

There are good story boards on the path to the lighthouse so by the time I get back to the carpark Sally has arrived and seen what she wants to see so we load up and head south.  It's years since we've been up this way so it's a chance to potter around the tourist route, visit the rainbow warrior memorial, the stone store, weekend market and waterfall in Kerikeri, take a guided tour of Te Tiriti grounds, catch a(nother) ferry to Okiato and follow Russell Road via the rather superb Helena Bay cafe and art gallery back to SH 1 and South.


Link to Technical Notes