Peaks and Places | Travel and Adventure Blog

While in the Auckland area, there were a few things/places we wanted to check out. One of those was Piha, which is west of the city, on the coast. Piha is a small beach town around 40 minutes drive from Auckland depending on where in Auckland you are coming from. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any (free) camping options up there, so we had to just do a quick day trip.

We haven’t been up to this little peninsula, just west of Auckland, since we very first arrived in New Zealand. Our first excursion was to Watipu, which you can read about here. This time, however, we wanted to explore somewhere we haven’t been before. This area is home to the Waitakere Ranges, and is probably the best native bush area near Auckland. It was very mountainous, and the road was not fun to drive getting out there.

It was pretty windy that day, but it was probably the nicest day we had all week. The waves at Piha definitely reflected the weather…they were HUGE. Like, scary huge. We still haven’t learned to surf, and we both agreed that today was definitely not the day to start. We saw two extremely brave people surfing, and they were both getting tossed around in the waves pretty good. We walked around on the beach for a little while, and even attempted to do a hike up Lion’s Rock, but unfortunately, the trail was closed due to some slips*. This was probably a blessing in disguise, because it was extremely windy, and Lion’s Rock is very exposed.

*We have since learned through a YouTube comment on our Piha video, this has been closed for years. Judging by the comment, we could have gotten up there, good to know for next time because Lion’s Rock looks like an awesome viewpoint.

We weren’t too discouraged, because we had several other hikes planned for the day, starting with Kitekite Falls. This hike already started off with a bang (in my opinion) because just past the car park, we crossed a bridge with a stream flowing under it. The stream had a ton of eels (Eric is not as fond of them). They were HUGE. Probably around four feet long and pretty girthy too. We spent a good couple of minutes checking them out before actually starting the hike to the falls.

The rest of the hike was very pretty, a nice hike through some native forest, following along the stream for the majority of the hike. There were even a couple of river crossings, which were fun. We decided to hike up first to the top of the falls, then go down to the base. We found the top to be a little underwhelming, and while it was still cool, we probably would skip it if we were to hike to the falls again. After a couple minutes up top, we headed back down and made it to the base of the falls. The base was much more beautiful, around 40 meters tall (~120 feet). We spent several minutes just hanging out by the falls, enjoying the view. There were a couple of other hikers there when we first arrived, but they headed back after a couple of minutes, and we had the entire place to ourselves.

After getting back to the car, we decided it was a good time for a little snack (yogurt with granola – yum) before heading to our next destination – Karekare. The road to get to Karekare was even worse than the road to get to Piha. It took us about an hour to get what would have been around 5 miles as the crow flies. The road we had to take was very curvy and there were a bunch of slips, so we really had to take our time.

We could see Karekare Falls from the side of the road as we were driving towards the beach. There was a carpark a little ways down, and we parked up there, and had to walk back up the road a little ways to make it to the start of the waterfall trail. This trail was much shorter than the previous hike, and probably took us a total of 10 minutes to make it all the way to the base of the falls. These falls, in my opinion, felt a little more magical than KiteKite falls. It almost felt tropical, as there were a couple giant palm ferns bordering the plunge pool.

Karekare Beach, in my opinion, was pretty similar to Piha. It was also incredibly windy, and the waves were still absolutely massive. Karekare did have a very cool coastline, with impressive cliffs and black sand. Like everything else today, we had the entire beach all to ourselves. Ours were pretty much the only footprints in the sand, and we probably have the wind and weather to thank for that. All in all, it was an incredibly day trip, and it’s amazing how close to Auckland all of this actually was. We are very glad that we managed to see these places while we were in the area.