TRIP REPORT: When a Beach is a Desert

There is a popular ad on TV down here addressing the age old question: When are togs (speedos) actually undies (tighties)? I thought this classic debate an apt starting point for a description of my last trek: the three night, Cape Reinga Coastal Walkway on the very tip of the north island.

The walk was amazing, handled perfectly well in flipflops or barefoot, but growing increasingly hardcore due to intense and unending sunshine and a scarcity of water. With pack on back, walking along the empty sandy beaches I started to wonder if perhaps this wasn't a beach at all, but a desert instead.



Just what are our necessary conditions for beach? I supposed that access to beer, bright coloured floating toys, women, and towels could be eliminated without damaging our definition. Other luxuries like access to shade and water were also dismissed, because these too were conditions only for a "nice" beach. As I swayed back and forth, stepping over kelp and jellyfish, feeling the hot sun on my body, I discovered that none of the aforementioned items were in sight, and my ideas about beaches began to shift. "So its not a nice beach."


But were these beaches at all I pondered? Surely the meeting of ocean and sand is enough to classify this as a beach... not so. As I sucked plastic water bottles into deformed modernist sculptures the thought of a dip in the cool Tasman sea became completely unattractive. Sure it would be cool for a minute, but that swim would mean I'd have to put on another thick layer of sunscreen and would contribute to increasingly thick layer of salt I'd have to sweat through. By the end of the second day of walking I had decided that it was in fact desert I was walking through, the cool blue water to my left, merely mirage.

With this shift in mindset the walk became quite enjoyable. By day I'd walk, smelling the hot manuka bushes, taking pictures of the lush coastline (imaginary) and pick muscles off the rocks (imaginary), by night I'd camp on empty sand beaches greeted by a cosmic paint-spill of stars, supervising the boiling of water from impotent streams. The days were hot but eating fresh seafood and being tired from walking felt good.

Other highlights included:

1. Cooking lessons for muscles from man on beach.
"Hey man, you don't perhaps know how to cook muscles, do you?"
"Do ah evva! E'm cooken' sim rit niw."

2. Crawling out of tent at 2 am and being overwhelmed by the number of stars.

3. The following night (using a book) making astrological sighting with new friends from Calgary (new constellations down here!) including a comet!

4. Oyster lessons from another old-timer on the beach.
"Ya just crack 'em n' slurp 'em up. Delicious."

5. Witnessing yet another domestic incident involving Mr. Tasman Sea and the inappropriately named, Ms. Pacific Ocean.

Pictures to follow.

MJPH