(written on November 28th from notes taken previously)
Got up, second night in this particular freedom camping spot.
Drove my way over to the bathrooms on the other side of the athletic field, made my deposit, and then drove north to visit Pokino Beach.
It was a pretty rocky gravel road, with what looked like much less friendly rock shapes than what one might hope for, but it was fine. Parked my van, the only vehicle in the parking area, which, look like a very little used parking area, so I wondered if what I was going was going to be what I hoped it was.
Anyway, headed down the path toward the beach, running into side paths here and there but sticking to the original, or at least what I thought the original might be.
After probably a 20-minute, Up and down walk, mostly down, I found myself at a very secluded beach. Unfortunately, it was not low tide, so the cave that goes from the beach side to the more violent rocky side underneath the hillside, was full of water, and though navigable, might not have been so fun to navigate. 🙃
So instead, I climbed along the rock face, up the hill over to the other side, and down to the tide pools nestled amidst the very sharp volcanic rock.
It was the kind of rock that looks like maybe once upon a time it was covered in some kind of living creature that left marble size golf ball dimples with sharp ridges all over the rock.
I had hoped to maybe find an octopus, or something like that, in the tide pools, but they were basically dead. I don’t think I saw a single living creature in them, even the bigger ones.
Odd.
Usually, you see something.
Hang out on the hillside overlooking the beach for a while, spending some of the time working on my journal catch up.
It wasn’t too long before my private secluded beach got crowded. 🙃
A whole bunch of not unattractive 20-something bikini-clad girls, by the looks of them, and then a couple… more seasoned couples. 🙃
I noticed that the people who travel the way that I do are generally in the 18 to 30 category (mostly on the younger side of that spectrum) or the retired category. The definitely aren’t many in my age group. I guess that’s because most people my age are still in the kids-at-home stage, and I’m in the never-had-kids stage.
Did some boulder scrambling on the other side of the beach because I saw something that was bright blue in the rocks a few hundred meters away.
Turned out to be a fishing net, I think? Washed up into the rocks, and unfortunately, permanently wedged in.
I guess if I had a knife with me I could have cut it up to haul most of it out, but it was large.
The hike, mostly uphill, back to the van seemed shorter than the walk down, gratefully.
Got back to the van to find a couple of teenagers or early 20-something boys turning Mary Jane into wisps of smoke on the breeze.
From there, I headed south to Whiritoa to explore Whiritoa Caves that looked like it might be pretty cool.
And it was. 😊
Way more than I expected. 😊
At first, I couldn’t find it. I tried to walk around the beach side, but the sea level was too high. Thinking that I might have missed my opportunity because of bad tide timing, and not wanting to brave the ocean, which was beating hard against the cliff face, I headed inland.
As I did, I noticed that there was a lot of sand on the inland side of the large hill/cliff formation, so I walked maybe 100 meters south in the inland side of that formation and started hearing ocean waves again!
So I knew that I was coming up on the cave that met up with the ocean on the other side.
But I didn’t expect what I saw next.
As I passed a tree on my left, at the base of the inland side of the big cliff/hill formation, I noticed that there was a freshwater stream running along a sandbar-type formation, which meandered a bit and then went directly into the side of the huge formation.
And it was beautiful.
It was lush and green like a garden next to sand, and it made its way through the smoothly polished rock of a tunnel, ocean waves visible on the other side.
But not brightly lit ocean waves.
As I carefully made my way along the slick rock, not wanting to end up with another phone in the water, the short tunnel opened up into a huge oval-shaped cave probably 15-20 meters across.
Except… it wasn’t a cave. Looking up, there was no roof! There the cave roof has long since collapsed, so it was just a big, round ceilingless room, with one freshwater tunnel entrance on the inland side and two saltwater entrances on the ocean side, one much larger than the other.
I wandered around taking pictures, trying to be super careful on the uber slick rock, and wishing the water in that room were deep enough to cliff jump off from the top down. 🙃
What a beautiful, magical little place. A place where three tunnel caves open up into a roofless dome, a place where freshwater meets salt, a place where lush green gives way to sand on one side and salty rock on the other.
A beautiful, bright spot I didn’t expect. 😊
[contented sigh]
After heading back to the van, I did some research into cell-phone repair and found a place back in Whangamatā that could get a screen in the next day and that seemed, over the phone, to be a one-off location with more flexible policies and prices (I called three or four different places and settled on that one), so I drove back to Whangamatā, drove to three different freedom camping locations before finding a place I could stay at the fourth.
Veged out to a couple movies (Click and… I forget the other 😅) and crashed for the night, grateful to have found a cell-phone repair place close by for what seemed like an ok price, and hopeful that my choice to get my phone repaired through a shop would work out. 🤞
Lift the world.
Bring it on.
~ stephen
Lift the World 