Farewell Spit - South Island farthest North
A long way up along the Golden Cost of New Zealand South island can be found one of the strangest biomes I personally had the pleasure to visit. A small desert swimming in the ocean, stretching far and thin in the giant sea, called elegantly and appropriately sandspit.
Stretching for 26 kilometers into the giant sea the Farewell Spit is the biggest of it's kind in New Zealand, a barren place full of treasures.
We started walking leaving behind the wonderful beaches of the most sunny part of South Island(or at least that is the expirience that the weather gave me during the stay). Slowly stuff start to change as we got deeper on the line, the first notice alarm is given away by the winds, quitly getting more and more grumpy as the sand of the beach turn into a more pale color. Flocks of swans were chilling and hunting close to the foreshore, I did not research further but they looked like swans or some really close parent to me.
Step by step the sands lost the golden colors and got more and more pale and with them the bushes were more sparse and dry till you could not see them anymore on the shore. At some point the shine vanished leaving space for a conteplative contrast beetwen the white sands and the blue sea.
At this point if you hopped with your back to the sea and walked for two minutes across the dunes you could sea the other side of the ocean and if stopped in the middle you could have the illusion of being in the middle of a desert.
The enviroment was getting harsh and the wind was using all it's strenght to to bully around the unfortunate travelers using the sands as a very mean whip. I remember that we had a small fight in that chaos, maybe was inevitable as it's not unusual having an argument on a long travel but there felt almost like some kind of entity was at work to create discord.
After a bit of rest under the protection of a dune we got along well again after some laugh and now I can't even remember what the fight was about, truly an incantation of the sands. We choose to go a bit more further up threading back closer to the beach were the wind seemed a bit more tolerant. The foggy horizon and those distant beaches were unlike anything I saw prior to it.
Something else started to strangely appear on our path, at first I tought it was garbage given how good we have become to polloute anywere nowdays. While there was a bit, though I would consider it under control as I found out people from NZ try to take care of their place, upon further inspection they were animal bones. At some point it was kinda glaring that this was a whales/big fish cemetery.Take a look here below.
There were many bones and sometimes carcass that were rotting in very different places probably due to the rising tides. Later I discovered that even some shipwreck happened here as the spit is a diffucult place to navigate close by.
As it was getting late we decided to draw back, the weather keep being very windy and the night on the spit wasn't an inviting accomodation.
So we trailed back as the water were starting to gather closer and closer to the shore with new smaller bird fishing the sands. We hopped on the van going back to the warm and fuzzy Takaka to the south of the Golden Coast saying goodbye to this strange piece of land wich proved us with it's earie presence but in the end I feel we made it out stronger.
Hope you enjoyed the read and have a goodweekend travelers!