Ninety Mile Beach

Ninety Mile Beach runs up the western side of the Aupōuri Peninsula in Northland, at the top of New Zealand's North Island, from Ahipara north toward Cape Reinga. It is about eighty-eight kilometres long, which is fifty-five miles, and the name has never been corrected.

It is a gazetted road. Buses and four-wheel-drive vehicles run the beach as a route to the cape, ordinary road rules apply, and the driving is tide-dependent — the window is roughly two hours either side of low water, and vehicles are lost to the incoming tide every year, including tour coaches. Rental agreements almost universally prohibit taking cars onto it.

The sand is pale and hard-packed at low tide with dunes behind, and the Tasman Sea arrives with real force and strong rips. It is a serious surfcasting beach — a national competition has been held here for decades — and a poor swimming one. Toheroa, a large shellfish once harvested commercially, live in the sand and are now protected.

For Māori this coast has significance beyond recreation: the beach forms part of the route taken by spirits travelling north to Cape Reinga, where they depart. Te Rerenga Wairua at the cape is the endpoint, and behaviour there is governed by tikanga that visitors are asked to observe. Te Paki's giant dunes at the northern end are where the sandboarding happens, and the stream running out of them is the usual entry point for vehicles onto the beach; it is also where most of the recoveries take place.

A gazetted road that is also a beach, drivable for two hours either side of low water and not at all in a rental car — the agreements prohibit it and vehicles are lost every year regardless. Surfcasters get the best of it. For everyone else the honest advice is a tour bus, and to remember on the way north that this is the route the dead take to Cape Reinga.