This region has always been of great spiritual and cultural significance to Maori. It is the place from which spirits depart.
Art leaves the forest ringing the great sand dunes that bank the beach.
Everything about Wharariki Beach has to do with scale. It's unimaginably vast.
We've arrived just an hour after low tide. All this water is merely a glassy moisture atop the sand.
This place just fills me up with joy.
Sun's out and it's warm!
Most of the landforms are accretions embedded with whole rocks.
Surfaces covered by the tides have barnacle mosaics.
A light sprinkle of rain and then it clears. We're also gifted with a virtually wind-free day, a rarity on Wharariki. Though the beach faces north, it's technically a west-coast beach, with attendant high winds and seas.
Though I haven't seen every NZ beach, this is high on the list of my favorites.
“It had only to do with how it felt to be in the wild. With what it was like to walk for miles for no reason other than to witness the accumulation of trees and meadows, mountains and deserts, streams and rocks, rivers and grasses, sunrises and sunsets. The experience was powerful and fundamental. It seemed to me that it had always felt like this to be a human in the wild, and as long as the wild existed it would always feel this way.”
We saw a group of seal pups playing in these shallows, flapping their flippers and acting like they were having all the fun.
It seems to be our week for these ever-engaging creatures. Art made a video (to view if reading in email, click here).
May the vastness of this remarkable place on our planet bring you solace in a troubled world.
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