Cape Reinga
Where two oceans collide and, in Māori belief, where every spirit departs.
Te Rerenga Wairua — the leaping place of spirits — is the northwestern tip of New Zealand and the most spiritually significant site in Māori culture. It is also the point where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean, and you can watch them fight about it.
The leaping place
Māori tradition holds that when a person dies, their spirit travels north along the coast to this headland. There it descends the roots of a lone pōhutukawa tree — said to be more than 800 years old, clinging to the rock face below the point — and enters the underworld to return to the ancestral homeland of Hawaiki.
The site is tapu. Eating and drinking at the point are not permitted, and visitors are asked to treat it as one would any place of the dead rather than as a viewpoint.
Two oceans meeting
Just offshore, the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean collide. The meeting is visible from land as a line of standing waves and churning water where the two currents shear against each other — sometimes subtle, sometimes violent.
The lighthouse above it was built in 1941 and stands 165 metres above sea level. Its signpost gives distances to Sydney, Los Angeles, Tokyo and the South Pole, and is the single most photographed object in Northland.
Ninety Mile Beach and the dunes
Despite the name, Ninety Mile Beach runs about 88 kilometres. It is legally gazetted as a public highway, which is why tour coaches drive along the sand — a firm-sand, tide-dependent, 4WD-only proposition that swallows several rental cars a year.
The Te Paki sand dunes near the northern end rise to well over 100 metres and are the best sandboarding in the country. Operators on the tours hand out toboggans; the walk back up is the hard part.