The big road trip begins!

We have a car! We have a tent! And most importantly we have the expectation that something will go wrong and so will be ready to deal with it when it does!

The first thing to note is that Joe is truly the single worst navigator of all time.

Following complaints of "I need a book to read maps from." I went and bought him an expensive map book. He continued to use his phone to give me directions like "you want to turn right down that street we just passed." And my favourite, "continue straight," "Joe it's a T junction," "yeah, continue straight."

Anyway we finally navigated down the twists and turns of Lorne Kare road to Kare Kare Beach. What a spectacular beach it is.

An elegant clear water stream trickling through the black volcanic sand around the feet of sheer igneous mountains of all shapes and sizes. From here a short walk of the expansive beach takes us to the wild surf. Waves crashing in from all directions creating climactic white crashes where two or even three different wave directions meet.

After a play in the surf and an explore of the foothills we took a strole down the beach and as we couldn't find the registered campsite; we set up camp on top of the highest grassy knol around, for spectacular views of the sunset and out to sea.

The only thing better than the view in the early evening was when I awoke at around 4am and saw the glorious white shine of the moon filling the evening sky, reflecting off the water to glimmer magically off the thrashing waves. The sky a deep purple and the millions of stars bursting forth with light like diamonds.

We awoke to a similarly fantastic morning and set off to a near by waterfall to clean up before back to the car to drive to the start point of our hike.

We hiked part of the Hillary trail today, hopping across streams and cool infinity pools of water at the top of a waterfall before scaling down to enjoy the six tier kite kite waterfall. A short trip down to Piha after our trek aloud us to find, absoloulty nothing! Piha has one shop. So after a sneaky shower at the campsite there we drove down to Anawhata beach. A staggeringly beautiful spot. 

Again we couldn't find the campsite we were aiming for so we nipped back to Piha to camp there.