I love beaches, so when we arrived at Ninety Mile Beach I was very excited. It's not exactly 90 miles, it's actually more like 60, but that's long enough for me.

We were staying in Ahipara which is at the southern end of the beach. As soon as we'd checked into the campsite we headed straight off to the beach with my newly bought tennis ball in tow.

The beach with the tide out was massive, even bigger than my expectations. Everywhere you looked was sand and in the distance you could see the sea.

Ninety Mile Beach is actually a highway that you can drive on at low tide, although hire vehicles are prohibited. It certainly looked more suitable for 4WD's. It didn't stop some holiday makers in their campervans though. We watched a group of people scooping sand away from the tires of their van with their bare hands trying to free it.

We sort of knew poor Blanche wasn't up for a ride on the beach, or even the 16km of unsealed road we needed to cover to make it to Cape Reinga at the north end of Ninety Mile Beach. So reluctantly we opted for a coach trip. I hate organised tours but the $45 price tag each including a picnic lunch swayed me.

At 9am sharp we got picked up from the iSite in Kaitaia. The bus driver/tour guide started his unoriginal and unfunny jokes pretty much straight away. I was still half asleep at this point having been up since 7am so quite easily switched off.

I became interested at our second stop which was at Rarawa beach. The sand was a perfect white and extremely fine in texture. The guide told us it had been created by the tectonic plates rubbing together.

The whole area we were touring is called the Aupouri peninsula which was once a series of separate islands, then sand started to blow up from the south and started to fill in the gaps leaving it now part of the mainland. You can see the soil is extremely sandy and ideal for the avocado orchards that we passed.

Along the way we also saw the ancient stumps of large Kauri trees laying in fields. These trees once covered the landscape and were instrumental in holding the soil together and helping form the peninsula. About 50,000 years ago there was a tsunami which knocked most of the trees over, the sand covered them and today farmers are finding them under their land.

We stopped for lunch at Tapotunpotu where there was a lovely bay and beach. So nice in fact the other coach tours stopped there for lunch too. We'd been pretty much in convoy with three other tours all day. A young group from the Awesome Adventure coach ran straight into the sea and started jumping the waves.

After lunch we took the short journey on to Cape Reinga. The coach parked up and we had 45 minutes to explore. We walked down and saw the lighthouse. It's now run off solar panels, but before they installed them our coach driver was the light house keeper for about three years. Luckily the sky was very clear and from the light house we had great views of the Three Kings islands and could also see the waves hitting each other where the Tasman sea and Pacific ocean meet.

As we are used to seeing and doing things in our own time we found the pace of the trip a little fast. Before we knew it we were back on the coach and off to toboggan down the Te Paki sand dunes. These dunes were pretty impressive. They were as steep as a black ski run but luckily for Richard as slow as a green!

We drove along a quicksand river from the dunes to Ninety Mile Beach. Shortly after the driver explained how if you stop in quicksand the vehicle will start to sink, a Japanese guy asked the driver to stop indicating that his friend was being sick. It brought back memories of being on school trips, where you could guarantee someone would eat too many sweets and throw up.

Once on the beach we stopped to let the guy get a bit of fresh air and also let off a passenger who was to begin his two day walk along the coast. Most of his backpack contained his 6 litre water supply.

On our drive along the beach we stopped and the driver showed us that about an inch under the sand there were Tuatua shell fish. Richard gathered up a couple of handfuls for his tea.

Further along the beach we saw the rusty top of an old car door sticking up from the sand, and a steering wheel from another.

The beach was pretty much empty as we drove along, just passing the odd 4WD and three other coach tours. The driver was telling us that when they hold a surf casting fishing competition, there can be thousands of people on the beach. Not surprising when the top price at the end of the 5 days for the biggest fish is $50,000!

After a long day we picked up Blanche and went back to the campsite at Ahipara. It was the most sociable campsite we've stayed in since being in New Zealand. We got chatting to a German guy who was in his latter years and just coming to the end of his 6000km trip around the country on his bicycle and camping in a tent. Also a German called Stephanie who's just finished her PhD in Dunedin. The only thing we can put the sociable atmosphere down to is the large table outside the kitchen which people tended to congregate round. Either that or everyone else is fed up of spending months not talking to anyone!

Katy