January 12

We had a couple days off in a row so we decided to do a couple daytrips. Today, we headed out to Mangawhai Heads to the beach to do some (you guessed, it!) fishing! We drove about a half hour and found ourselves in a cute town. We decided to attempt to help our fishing mojo by consuming a vast amount of fried food, curly fries and deep fried Camembert. It was an overcast day with intermittent misting, but we made our way down to the beach. We fished for a couple hours and I got bored and decided to walk the beach and explore. The scenery was quite striking.

The colors were amazing and as I walked I left many of the beachgoers behind. I found myself walking across sandstone and black sand.

(That first picture isn’t showing indentations or footprints, that is actually the variations in sand color between beige and black.)

As I continued on, I came across one of the most fascinating stretches of beach that I have encountered in all of New Zealand. It was an inlet where the entire beach was covered (and I mean covered) with seashells. There was no sand to be seen.

It was so amazing! I have heard of a beach in California that is covered with seaglass. It is a place that I have always wanted to visit. This beach took my breath away because of the sheer unexpected pleasure of finding thousands of shells in one place. It simply ended in a straight line and went back to being sand.