Te Rerenga Wairua

The area North of Auckland goes by the name Northland, or The bay of Islands. This area is home to some of the largest and oldest trees in the world.

The Kauri trees are very unique to New Zealand and an essential part of Maori history and culture. The Maori have been using these trees for thousands of years for everything from canoes to cutlery and tattoo ink.

Seriously these trees are the biggest, sturdiest and oldest I’ve ever seen! Most live to be hundreds of years old with some even reaching into the thousands.

It is said that hugging a Kauri tree brings you goodluck... 

The oldest recorded Kauri tree in New Zealand is 3000 years old!

  

Enough about the trees (although they are really quite amazing)...

On our way up to the top of New Zealand we had a bit of a pit stop ...at the sand dunes. This particular stop really made me realize just how diverse New Zealand is. There we were just driving along through a dense forest when all of a sudden you see sand dunes peaking out on the horizon.

It was literally a desert in the middle of the forest!

We went sand boarding on the dunes, which is essentially riding down the dunes as fast as you can on a body board. Unfortunately the first time I didn’t hold on tight enough AND forgot to keep my mouth closed... I’m sure you can imagine the result.

For lunch we stopped at a beautiful beach where we thankfully got to go swimming and wash off all the sand we had accumulated from an intense hour of sand boarding.

Next stop Cape Reinga. To get to Cape Reinga you have to drive along a highway that’s called 90-mile beach. As you can probably figure out by the name it is actually a beach. So there we were, speeding down a beach with the Tasman Sea right beside us. It was quite a unique experience, especially since our driver decided to see how many birds he could scare away... just to make things a little more interesting.

Cape Reinga is where the Tasman Sea meets with the Pacific Ocean. On some days you can even see this faint line of the two bodies of water meet, the blue meeting the slightly green color.

More importantly however Cape Reinga (known to the Maori as Te Rerenga Wairua) is a very spiritual place, it is here that the Maori believe spirits leave the earth on their journey into the heavens.

It was truly amazing to be able to experience something that is so spiritual and special to the Native people of this amazing country.