Life’s a beach, and then you swim

EYES SORE: What more could you want for with a few days off? Pictures by Louis McKenna

JUST a hop and a skip down the road from Gisborne, Mahia may not seem an exotic holiday place, but to a family of Aussies it’s about as appealing as it gets.

We stayed at a friend’s holiday house off Mahia East Coast Road, at the end of a dead-end lane that cuts off at a clifftop overlooking a fabulous stretch of coast. I thought the Great Ocean Road was good but I dip my cap to Mahia.

Access to the smugglers’ cove below was through a copse of trees, a knotted string and then a shaky rope ladder.

Just a month or so earlier the clifftop had retracted by a few metres, and from the beach you could look up and see a gate and a few loops of fencing wire shooting the breeze, a little friendly warning dangling in space.

We yanked the rope ladder a few times before applying weight to it, and though wobbly it seemed like it would hold.

We explored the stretch of beaches along the East Coast Road, shiny and untouched under a big blue sky.

Mid-October and the swimming was marginal, but with the sun out we took a risk and a dip proved worth it.

‘Bracing’ might be too strong a word, but the temperature was ‘crisp’. Once you were in though, the water was beautiful and all see-through.

One of the beaches had curious straight lines of rock stretching out to sea, the result of some volcanic or erosion activity, as well as fantastically-weathered boulders, one doing a pretty good imitation of a whale tail about to slap the water.

At all beaches we enjoy a bit of beachcombing, and this one was no disappointment, with a fabulous array of smashed sea shells, bits of crazy-coloured paua shell, an outlandish bright blue fish vertebra, three dead fish, and then the catch of the day, a dead shark. Of course, we couldn’t let it lie, and dragged it back out to sea over the lines of rocks to give it a proper sea burial. No doubt it washed up again a few hours later but sometimes you do pointless things on holidays.

I’m not sure what sort it was, except that it was little and grey, its skin was sandpapery and its teeth were small but big enough that were it hungry it could probably have had a go. After giving it its water burial we hopped into the blue sea, lay back and looked at the sky again.

Mahia is unbearably green, so green it almost hurts the eyes, enough to steal the ‘Emerald Isles’ moniker from Ireland. You have these unbelievably steep and pointy green mountains (to Australian eyes) where goats and sheep cling on by their toes. The mountains run straight down to the sea, with a slash of white sand in between.

Back home at our smugglers cove, we watched the tide go in and out, then belatedly my 16-year-old and I decided to walk around the island when the tide was out. Belatedly because the tide was pretty much back in when we hit the beach. The sand is black in parts, which someone suggested was raw tin, but I can’t vouch for it. The waves did get a bit rough as we waded out, and though Louis tried to avoid the water by doing a bit of rock climbing, he eventually had to abandon that and get wet.

We made it to the island, walked around it and scared the seabirds off temporarily, then ‘swaded’ back to the beach, the incoming tide threatening to splatter us on the rocks, a great father-son experience if you survive it.

Apart from the rocket-launching site, Mahia is dead quiet, and when the rockets aren’t launching it’s even more quiet. The rain came down hard one day we were there, which is my favourite thing at the beach other than a sunny beach.

We made a stone octopus on one stretch of sand, clambered over the biggest piece of driftwood I’ve ever seen, and into the evenings played cards and span tops.

A holiday like that may not be bartering with street vendors in Luang Prabang, but with the hush or roar of the sea as you drift off to sleep, what more could you want for with a few days off?