155km/h on 90 Mile Beach

A great day must be followed by a bad one. But who sticks to the rules here? We set off early, with a car. First a little to the north, and then along well-hidden and gated paths to the west to 90 Mile Beach. Maoris show us the way. The last few metres are through ankle-deep sand and a small river. Jeep? Pah, Toyota Starlet!

Ninety-Mile Beach is not as long as its name suggests. But it is infinitely wide, now at low tide. The sand is firm and very even. At one point, a Kiwi held the high-speed world record here for a few years at 264 km/h. A few Maoris are driving around in big jeeps with a hundred fishing rods. We have other plans.

Every car hire contract in New Zealand states in red that unpaved roads are prohibited. Now you have to realise that this applies to around 25% of all roads in New Zealand. Pretty cheeky, isn’t it? You should ask cheeky questions about cheeky rules. Such as “Is a beach also a non-asphalted road?”. We agree on a unanimous “No.”.

The result is pure joie de vivre. Where else in the world could you drive 60 kilometres along the beach by car? Where and how could you write “New Zealand” on the earth in a size that even the astronauts on the ISS could read without glasses? Does seawater also clean cars, or does it just make them rust faster? Does aquaplaning occur earlier in salt water, and how high and far can water splash? How fast can seagulls take off and fly? Can cars dance? At what speed does sand start to fly?

I don’t have any answers to these questions. But we found out everything. I’ll just tell you about the effect on all our faces: grins from ear-wash to ear-wash. With this grin, we drive further south to a small Maori settlement called Ahipara. Almost all the Maoris are fat. At lunch we find out why. Pure fat has fewer calories than this meal, which makes our brains go gaga within seconds. As a direct result, I ask a couple of locals where we can hire quads. They are standing right in front of the sign pointing to it.

Kerstin and Susi want to go quad biking. More beach fun. We share the bike for an hour. The dunes suffer a lot from our tracks. What I didn’t realise: quads tip over pretty quickly when you heat in tight circles. Nasty four-legged friends. Enduros are much better behaved despite only having two wheels.

We drive up the last high mountain on the west side of the North Island. At the top, we discover car wrecks, great views and a dried-up white river. What does “Down Under” actually mean? Everything here is strange and magical.

We drive home and cook something healthy. Cédric has a crush on Bill Gates’ wife. And our farmer’s wife comes home pretty drunk, third in the local golf tournament. She’s really noisy, I would have thought she was more of an arm wrestler than a golfer. At least one of the other four women was already pregnant when she left, she says. I almost burst out laughing. Hole in one in New Zealand.