This is the place

Horses. We always had horses; at least five or six. We used to leave from Omapere and ride up Signal Station Road, then around the clifftops along a designated walking track that skirted farms to get to Waimamaku Beach. In some parts, the track ran along the edge of the cliff-tops. My girlfriend always had to look inland because the sight of the rocks and sea below from up high on her horse was too terrifying. You’d just pray the horse wouldn’t stumble.

We’d stop somewhere for lunch on the way, wherever we got tired, and then carry on. Eventually we’d drop down to the beach at Waiwhatawhata and then along to Waimamaku. You had to plan the day depending on the tide because you couldn’t get round the beaches at high tide. We galloped the horses down the yellow sand.

Then we’d come back by getting up onto the beach road which was about four kilometres of metal road, and then back onto the main highway and home. When we first moved to Omapere in 1980, there were a few baches, some quaint little houses, a few new houses, a few motels – not many, and the old Omapere Tourist Hotel. That was it.

Omapere is at one end of a 3 or 4 kilometre stretch of road which is notionally cut across the middle, the other end of which is known as Opononi. At the Heads near Opononi, the ti-tree is wind-battered and all bent in the direction of the predominant wind, fixed in permanent position. Behind the settlement of Omapere are steep hills. We’d take our horses up them and look across Hokianga Harbour to the huge dunes on the other side. Those dunes are famous.

Tourists come to look at them and now they can take an excursion over to them to do dune-boarding. Sometimes the beach would be sand, and sometimes stones as the dunes moved back and forth with the tides. The beaches were beautiful, and if you were lucky, mostly empty of people.

As the years passed, the occasional Aucklander would complain about us galloping horses on the beach so we did a survey and determined that the most number of people ever on the beach at any one time (except at Christmas) was eleven.