Daytrip to HUIA and PIHA

With Oskar's day off from racing we took a daytrip to 2 beaches,Huia and Piha, just an hours drive from Auckland. Huia was recommended to us by a lady at the Takapuna Lakehouse Art Center that has a cottage there and Piha is a world famous surfers beach. The 2 were vastly different even though they were just a half an hour from one another.

Huia is a quiet beach with an extremely shallow bay that allows for a great distance from high to low tide. We walked for about 10 minutes from the high tide line out to the low tide low. Standing in the middle of tideline looking up at the mountains with no one around made me feel very insignificant, small, and in awe of the power of nature. It was a picturesque beach with rain forest covered volcanic mountains as a back drop and would be an ideal beach for an infant or elderly person beacause of its still warm water. The town had one general store, a few scattered cottages, and that was really it.

Piha was more built up (relatively) there were several high end cottages and condos being developed, a surf school, and the swimming there was not for the faint of heart. Only surfers were outside of the lifeguards flags, which were only 25 ft apart(note: no one swims outside of the flags in NZ or AUS, unless you have a death wish). The waves were big and the riptides were strong. I chose to be an observer and watch the surfers catch big swells and the swimmers get tossed.


Picture 1: Huia beach at low tide from the look out point

Picture 2: Looking out into the open ocean from Huia's lookout point

Picture 3: Oskar posing with our sweet Diatsu and his manly soda water

Picture 4: Looking down over Piha from the top of the volcanic mountain

Picture 5: On Piha's black sand beach