Waipu Caves and Mangawhai

Last Tuesday when I was trying to figure out what I would get up to this weekend, I got an offer from Maddy of joining in on a trip up to Mangawhai on the coming Friday (21 of March). This sounded super fun, but wasn’t ideal from a scheduling point of view as I had 3 lectures that day. But after some consideration I decided that I could afford to skive off those classes, made easier by the fact that all lectures are available as recordings afterwards.

And so early Friday morning I packed up my things and walked up to the car rental spot. There I met Maddy and a very small car, and after a few minutes the other three also turned up, and we set out northward. This was a very squished car ride with three quite large guys in the back, I actually think we were wider combined than the car and so ended up sort of overlapping each other at the shoulders. But we managed and after about a two-hour drive we arrived at the Waipu Caves, our first stop.

Waipu caves is a large cave system that is managed by the Department of Conservation (DoC, will probably hear more about them) and you can just access for free. Just a two-minute walk from the car park to the opening in the picture above. Oh, and did I mention there are glow-worms in the cave 🤩

To enter you just walk into the cave, parallel to a very shallow river that flows into the mountain. You then pretty much immediately find yourself in a very wide cave hall with a river running into a tunnel on the right which quickly gets deeper with the roof coming down quite low, and on the left the hall continues deeper into the mountain. We explored this first hall for a bit, found what looked like the bones of 1/3 of a cow, and I made an attempt at following the river into the mountain but turned back as the water just got deeper and deeper, and I was just in my normal clothes.

Then we continued inwards, walking across the shallow river and entering into a much taller cave chamber, and here we also started to need to do some actual climbing. Then, when we turned down the lights we saw them, hundreds of small, oh so surprisingly blue pinpricks of lights in the ceiling. It is truly something out of this world, looking up in near total darkness and seeing what looks like constellations of cyan stars. Photos doesn’t come close to do it justice, especially not with just a phone and even the best one I got below is not very good. So from that point the cave exploration was slowed down by way less light, and interspersed with a lot of stopping and admiring the ceiling.

When we were maybe 100 meters into the mountains the terrain became even less easily traversable, with a lot of big rock. So here I left the rest of the group and ventured a bit further on my own. Though the climb was quite difficult, almost entirely due to the fact that all the rock were covered in a thin layer of clay/sediment which is very slippery, I reached another very tall cave chamber of my very own. Being alone, more than a 100 meter into a mountain, in a grand chamber dotted with tiny cyan pinpricks of light was truly special. But as being there completely on my own and not knowing if the others were waiting on me, I quite quickly moved back, this time through a part of the river stepping on underwater rocks to not have to redo the climb.

Then we slowly made our way out, and in the last hall I made another attempt at the river, but once again stopped with the water almost up to my upper thighs as it continued getting deeper. Would have been fun to do if I had togs on, but we had another stop on our trip.

So we crammed back into the car and started driving back down towards the coast. On the left we had a beautiful view of the cliffs Whangarei Heads and Hen Island as we drove down the coast towards Mangawhai Heads. It was in fact so nice that we stopped at Waipu beach to just enjoy the view and dip our feet in the water. No swimming though 😐 as we were by this point very hungry, and so on we went to Mangawhai.

In Mangawhai we found an awkward parking spot (at a supermarket 😅) and then went for lunch in a very nice little food court, I had some cheap and very good Fish ‘n Chips. Then back on the road and down to the beach and are first greeted by Sentinel Rock standing sentinel at the mouth of Mangawhai harbour. The beach here was really nice, wide and probably close to two kilometres long. Our plan here was to walk the Mangawhai Cliff Walk, which started by walking along the beach, and then climbing the cliffs.

So off we went, walking first down the lovely beach in the warm sun, coming upon a lot of cool shells on the beach, and a large sand dune maybe 20 meters tall leaning against the western cliffs. When we reached the turn-off point to climb the cliffs we split up, due to us running slightly low on time, and the other three preferring to stay and swim rather than climbing the 150-meter cliff.

So just me and Alexander set out to climb the cliff, which started out quite physically demanding as basically the whole 150-meter climb was in just one go. But after that the walk was just along the cliff, so not that much height changes. The view from up to was really spectacular, the deep blue-green ocean, the hazy mountainous islands and heads, and the dry but lush forest. We walked for maybe 30 minutes just chatting and enjoying the view before the trail started to descend into a cove out on the northern tip of the heads. As we walked down we were greeted by a sea smoothed rock beach, and some really fantastic rocks rising out of the ocean. And a really fantastic rock arch, I really enjoy those 😃.

Of course, I had to go climbing on those rocks, the little red circle in the top right photo is where I’m sitting in the bottom right one. But mum will be happy to know I didn’t do anything that stupid, I refrained from climbing the tallest one. Then we had some snacks on a rock in the shade, just gathering our strength before the trek back, I saw something out returning back into the water some ways out. As we looked and wondered what it could have been we saw them, a whole pod of dolphins which were swimming past. While quite far out, they were still clearly visible, and one of them even did a flip 🤩 Unfortunately they were very hard to photo at such a distance, but if you look closely at the video below you can see them jumping just to the right of the small rock on the horizon.

After this marvellous end of our break we started walking back, this time along the shoreline. At first, it was very rocky, though with some really nice costal rocks (yes I climbed some of them). Then the beach slowly turned towards smaller and smaller rocks, followed by sand made up by broken shells. There was even a small section made up of just full on shells, which felt somewhat sacrilegious to walk on. When we made it back to the normal beach we found the others swimming, but by this time we were running low on time and as such, we didn’t have time to join them.

So final cramped ride in the car, and we returned happy and tired to Auckland after a very intense Friday.