Cape Reinga & Ninety Mile Beach

A visit to New Zealand is not complete without a journey to the top of the North Island – Cape Reinga (Te Rerenga Wairua). Uncover the wild beauty of this vast and untouched region that is rich in Maori culture and tradition Twelve degrees below the Tropic of Capricorn, Cape Reinga thrusts its gritty head north to bask in subtropical sunlight. Here, under the watchful gaze of the wind-whipped Cape Reinga lighthouse, the Tasman and Pacific meet, colliding in a fit of fury and spitting salty spray high as they battle for dominance. Maori believe that at Cape Reinga, “the place of the leaping”, the spirits of the departed leap from an 800-year-old pohutukawa tree on the windswept cape to begin the voyage back to their final resting place in the ancestral homeland of Hawaiki. According to legend, spirits begin their passage to the afterlife at Ninety Mile Beach, and no trip to Cape Reinga is complete without traveling via Ninety Mile Beach’s sand highway. This magnificent beach arches in an unbroken stretch of white sand for some 88 kilometres and is flanked by the Aupouri Forest, a Narnia-like place where bands of wild horses roam free amid legends of a shipwreck lost in the midst of time.

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