The Beach

Mile 63.5 / KM 102.3
Cape Reinga to Ahipara

Podcast of the day: "My Dad wrote a Porno" This is brilliant. It makes me laugh out loud on trail.

I miss: My blister free days.

I had just "designed" my little card board hitch-hiking sign and posted myself on the side of the road leading out of Kaitaia, when an old lady holding a dog in her arms came walking towards me from across the road. She asked me where I was going so I proudly presented my sign, hoping I might get lucky. Instead I got yelled at and told off what a fool I was hitching all by myself. Her rant ended with her shouting I was going to be "just another statistic". I do get her point. Hitching can be very dangerous, especially being a girl, but it is a part of hiking culture and most of the time the only way to get to, or from a trail. Her yelling at me made me feel insecure though and it took me a moment to shake off the bad vibes.

2 hours and 4 rides later I had made it to Cape Reinga without becoming another statistic. All of the drivers were super nice and allowed me a little window into their world up north. I had met some other hikers at the hostel the night before, but except of a very tall dutch couple everyone was already done with the first beach section so I started my adventure solo. I made my way down to the beach and up and over red rock faces, then down to the beach again. The first camp site was 12km away and I got there around 2pm which felt way too early to be calling it a day. John, a triple crowner (someone who's hiked all three long distance trails of the U.S) who I had met on the bus to Kaitaia had waited for me at the site which was nice. We hiked on together, did 30km by the end of the day and camped somewhere behind the dunes in the woods. I pitched my tent like someone who had never seen a tent before. It was ridiculous. A storm rolled in and I kept waking up thinking my tent was going to collaps at any minute. Luckily it didn't.

The next morning the beach looked like a beach from the moon. Never been there, but this is how I imagine a moon beach would look like. It was beautiful. I saw a couple of dead hammer head shark babies lying around which fishermen had ditched along the beach. They were fishing for snappers. Walking on sand was getting harder by the hour because we kept using the same set of muscles all day long. No ups, no downs, just flat and more flat. We hiked 40km and by the end of the day I was completely exhausted, just dragging myself to the Utea campsite. A snail could have passed me at this point. The camp is run by a really nice couple and the lady there makes mean smoothies for hikers for 10$. I inhaled it and then pitched my tent behind her house - this time like a champ. I had just sat down in the communal kitchen when the rain came pouring down again. It was raining so hard, that the water rose and almost made its way into the kitchen. Flip Flops were floating around the house when I ran out to my tent and grabbed my belongings, afraid the water was about to make its way into my palace. Luckily it didn't.

Day three was relatively uneventful at first with just more beach to cover. But then another thunderstorm rolled in and things got very exciting very quickly. The storm forced us to crawl over the big dunes to hike closer to the tree line. That way though, we happened to discover a secret forest road which followed the beach for quite a while. A welcome change to the never ending flat sand. By 3pm I had finally made it to Ahipara which meant I had survived the 90 mile beach in three instead of four days, which also meant that my body was falling apart. I hitched a ride back to Kaitaia and spent the rest of the evening doing laundry and trying to get sand out of curious places.