Cape Reinga, at the top end of North Island, is a sacred place for the Maori, and a big tourist attraction – an interesting coming together of cultures.
For the Maori, the spirits of the dead travel up the mountain ridges of the North Island to this point, then descend to the underworld through the roots of an ancient Pohutukawa tree.
For tourists, the cape is an attraction because it is where two seas meet – the Tasman Sea from the west, and the Pacific Ocean from the east. They don’t just flow gently together: they create a turbulent set of waves that is a magnificent sight.
The Maori consider the waves and whirlpools created when the seas meet as representing the coming together of male and female to create life. Indeed, they name the eastern sea (the Pacific) as female and the western (the Tasman) as male. The whirlpool patterns are also like those that follow behind a canoe as it is paddled over the water. This spiral shape is also the shape of the sprouting fern (what we would call a fiddle head) that is so common here. Thus, the spiral is found in all sorts of Maori carvings.
As a tourist spot, Cape Reinga isn’t all that easy to get too. It is about 100 kilometers up the peninsula from the nearest town of Kaitaia. We chose to take a bus tour, rather than drive the two-lane highway (much of which was a gravel road up until a decade ago) up the peninsula. This offered several advantages. First, our driver, Selwyn, was a local man who described himself as “a Polish, German Maori.” He regaled us with many tales of boyhood adventures in the area from the 50s and 60s, as well as what it was like as a child to hunt, fish, farm and work a dairy farm to help support a family of a dozen. He even rattled off the various trades that he and his brothers had taken up: teaching, plumbing, auto mechanic, cabinet maker, etc.
The second advantage of the bus – which was actually a milk tanker chasis retrofitted with a tourist bus seating area – had four-wheel drive and could drive the first 70 kilometers up the west side of the peninsula on the beach! This stretch of beach is called 90-mile beach (mapping misnomer!) and is wonderfully beautiful and desolate. The day we were on the tour, the timing of the tide meant that we drove almost the whole 70 kilometers before stopping, so as to make sure that we got around a particular point of rock before the tide got too high!
The bus tour also allowed us to partake of the latest craze in the far north – sliding down massive sand dunes on a boogie board. I (Marsha) can tell you from experience, that coming down a sand dune is a whole lot easier than climbing up! Watch a video of me coming down, steering and braking by dragging my feet!
While these bus trips are aimed at tourists, I appreciated how the department of conservation and the bus companies have worked with the Maori to respect their traditions. For example, the Maori do not eat in sacred places, so the tour buses stop for lunch at a beach just south of the Cape. And the walk from the parking area down the ridge to the lighthouse tells the stories of Maori beliefs as well as the history of European contact at this place.
We are so glad that we had this opportunity to see the place where two seas — and two cultures — come together.
Green Edges 