Wandering the Great Sand Dunes

Just south of Cape Reinga on the west coast is the misnomered ’90 Mile Beach’ – we aren’t sure how it got the name given that NZ uses kilometers and the beach is apparently only 65 miles long. But it’s a pretty big beach with a lot of sand, and a lot of that sand gets piled up into dunes, giving us the opportunity to make a stop at the Te Paki Great Sand Dunes. We did a fair amount of plodding over the sand to try to get ‘the best’ view and found ourselves surrounded in all directions and imagining how it might feel to be lost in a desert :)

We really enjoyed looking at the wind waves and patterns in the sand, discovering sections that were mysteriously still holding water, crunching our feet through patches crusted by wind and water and watching some kids sand tobogganing.