Karekare Falls, Piha Beach, Omeru Falls

[canyonwalker]

New Zealand Travelog #39
Kaukapakapa, NZ - Sun, 21 Apr 2024, 4pm

Today we've gone hiking at a few locations west and north of Auckland. We hiked Karekare Falls, walked around on Piha Beach, and hiked the Omeru Falls track. I'll continue here with my approach of not including photos in this journal entry, in the interest of getting through this trip without lagging behind a week or more. (Indeed, as I finally post out this journal I've already been home half a day.) I'll followup with photos and more details later. For now, here are Five Things about today's adventures:

• I awoke early and puttered around the hotel room. Thanks to our upgrade to a big suite I was able to work on blogs and stuff without bothering Hawk while she slept in. "Shouldn't we get an early leave on hiking instead of writing about hiking?" you might wonder. Yeah, but the weather sucked. Not long after sunrise the persistently gloomy skies opened up with a shower. We waited out the rain a bit to see if the day would improve. It did, but only a little.


• Karekare Falls is in a regional park on the Tasman Sea coast west of Auckland. The gloomy weather made everything kind of gray, though the daily rains of the past 2 weeks meant there was plenty of flow in the falls. In fact there was even a bonus falls high up on a steep mountainside we could see from the road. After we hiked the falls we hiked out to the beach. The wind was so strong it was hard to stand straight.


• We intended to hike Kitekite Falls a few miles away but there was a road closure the last mile or two leading to the trailhead. It was one of those "Road Closed - Local Traffic Only" things. We considered going in anyway. But with the gloomy and rainy weather we decided if there were actually a reason for a closure— nominally it's to repair storm damage, but given the neighborhood is all millionaires who're pissy about other people wanting to enjoy their ocean views, the temporary closures seem semi-permanent— today would be a good day to respect that.


• Instead of hiking Kitekite Falls we spent time on Piha Beach. We walked around the black sands and checked out a really big, imposing hill called Lion Rock right by the water. Again the winds were strong, though not quite hard-to-stand strong. It was weird watching black sand blow around us. It was like a scene in a dystopian scifi movie from a ruined planet.


• After these hikes near Piha Beach west of Auckland we headed north an hour or so to Omeru Falls. It's in Kaukapakapa, past the outskirts of what could be considered metro Auckland. If Auckland were San Francisco, this would be up in wine country, like Santa Rosa. In fact the area felt like wine country, geography wise. Though it being New Zealand there were way more sheep than grape vines. 😂 Oh, but hiking.... 🤣 Yeah, the Omeru Falls was a great little park. Well maintained trails lead to multiple small waterfalls, the biggest being about 40' tall. We had the park nearly to ourselves; there were only 3, maybe 4, other small groups out there. I guess the generally crummy weather scared people away, though thankfully it didn't actually rain on us while we were hiking.