The beach.

Te Araroa trail starts with the “90 mile beach”. It’s actually 100km, so whoever named it, had his conversions slightly off. Ah mile, kilometer, potato, potuhto, who cares, right? I do. I’m happy it’s not 90 miles. I’ve never been a huge fan of beaches. I think I might have taken this feeling to the next level after this walk.

I’ve scheduled my hiking times around daylight before, around desert heat, water sources, elevation, but scheduling them around high and low tides is a first. It’s slightly annoying, since these days high tides were between 09:00-11:30 and then again at 19:00-21:00. Around an hour or two before and after high tide the beach is gone and you have to sit it out. Of course, if having waves up to your butt and being splashed when the wave hits the vertical dune wall is your kind of fun, you can still walk, whatever floats your boat, but I am still friends with my sanity sometimes. The second day when the waves squeezed me out of the beach I didn’t feel like spending 3 hours sitting in dunes waiting for the trail to appear from underwater. It was windy and a bit rainy, so I found a parallel forest road and walked the forest instead. Saw some wild horses (was not on drugs). Third day I was going to jump to the forest again, but saw footprints of 2 dogs following a 4WD footprints. Kind of hoped somebody was just “walking” his doggies, but finding a human (especially casually walking two dogs) in that place was like finding a thumb in your can of coke (plausible but rare), and there were reports of feral dogs on TA here and there, so this time I chose the dune and a book. I’ve decided that me and my swiss knife could take one dog max.

Ok, now say something positive about beaches. The weather was good, it wasn’t too windy, my sunburn is not on all of my body, the water is blue, saw many curious things, i like walking, and bikepackers have started to come through (doing the same thing). I have been considering giving my ankles a break after this hike, and destroy my knees instead doing some bikepacking, and TA seems to be the perfect ground for observing and asking questions.