Cape Reinga

It’s been a very eventful few days! We were closely watching a big slow-moving sub-tropical low that was forecast to dump a huge amount of rain on the country, starting with northland, where we were headed. The rain started Wednesday night, as forecast, so we got an early start on Thursday morning, on the road by 06:45 in steady rain. With the twisty winding roads, we slowed down quite a bit, and everyone else did too. We were headed to Whangerei for the night before going further north. Got there with time to kill before we could check in so did a few chores. We found a decent pub for dinner, then started looking closely at road closures in north of us. Our plan was to get to Rangiputa on the Karikari peninsula where we’d booked in for 3 nights. In Kaitaia, the storm system dropped more than 240mm of rain in 2 days, 2 months worth of rain! Lots of slips, flooding, and bridge damage. We waited until Friday morning to make our final decision. We messaged with the motel we were heading to and they had missed the full impact and roads in the area were open. Overnight, the highway crews worked to clear most of the major highways so we ended up with only a short detour around the biggest problem area in Kaitaia. It was a bit surreal driving north on Friday on a beautiful sunny day after the rain the previous 2 days. Fields along the way had become lakes and lots of small slips. We only had one small flooded road to deal with and no issues!

We got to our motel, the White Sands Apartments and settled in. This is a big recreational fishing area and most people come here to fish! The beach is beautiful, and it is absolutely white sand, very fine white sand. Tony, along with his wife Lou manage the motel, and they are typical down-to-earth kiwis who would do anything for you, no questions asked. Generous and genuinely very nice people! Tony met us when we drove in, got our parking sorted and made sure we had everything we needed.

Our main reason for coming here was to be close enough to Cape Reinga, for us, an absolutely must see for this trip. We thought we weren’t going to make it because of road/storm issues so we were really happy to get up Saturday, have a quick breakfast and head north.

Cape Reinga is a special place in New Zealand. It sits at the very top of the North Island and it’s where the Tasman Sea and South Pacific meet. Cape Reinga is also the most sacred place in NZ for Māori. It is there, that the spirits of the deceased depart for Hawaiki, the homeland of their ancestors.

The trip to Cape Reinga was a nostalgic trip for us. We sailed around the cape in late 1999 on our first 36 foot ketch we named “Loon Echo”. We bought and refit the boat in Whangerei over a couple of months before heading out to get back to Wellington. It seems counterintuitive to head north to go south, but for us, because our home marina was on the north side of the Cook Strait, rounding the top and heading down the west coast was the best plan. It was an interesting trip! We had a couple of other people on board, one seasoned sailor and one not. We ended up turning back just as we were about to round Cape Reinga and dropping one crew off, before continuing. Our short trip turned into about 7 days due to weather delays but we made it safely.

This trip was actually our third time there, and the second by land. When we first lived in NZ, we drove up to Cape Reinga with my parents who visited us from Canada for a month. A lot has changed since that first trip nearly 30 years ago.

We’ve been touring around NZ since December 2 and we’ve both been feeling that it’s maybe time to head back to Canada. There is also the added risk of the impacts on New Zealand’s fuel supply, all of which comes from overseas. New Zealand does not refine anything, all refined fuel, petrol, diesel, and aviation fuel all comes in by ship. Their fuel is refined in countries that rely on oil that passes through the Strait of Hormuz. There is an increasing awareness here of the threat that this whole situation has on the country. Costs of fuel has soared. We watched the price of petrol for our little car creep up daily. Our last fill cost is 352.9c / litre. That’s up well over a dollar a litre from when we first arrived. Bottom line, we talked about this a lot and decided that we were going to try and sort out flights to get home much earlier. We re-booked our Air New Zealand flights to get us to Los Angeles, and then booked on WestJet to get the rest of the way home. Luckily we have lots of WestJet points saved up so the new flights are all on points. We leave April 8th and the trip is a bit longer than originally planned. We don’t get back in Nova Scotia until April 10th after around 56+ hours of travel.

We’ve done a lot on this trip, and one regret we have leaving ahead of our original plan is that we will only get to spend a weekend with our friends John and Pip on Waiheke Island before we leave. Thankfully, we did have a short visit with them when we first arrived.

Lots of to do before we leave, but I’ll leave that for the next post