On Wharariki Beach

Golden Bay here we come. Rachel and I drove over the Takaka Hill, an enormously high hill known as the marble mountain, to Golden Bay. We café-ed and coffee-ed our way through the Bay until we finally reached our destination at the Wharariki Holiday Camp.
Lunch at the Wholefood Trading Company in Takaka was amazing. We both had beer-battered blue cod, my favourite fish, with a green salad. We enjoyed cold drinks at the Puponga Café which is at the base of Farewell Spit. This area of Golden Bay encircled by Farewell Spit is notorious for pilot whale strandings. There have been several strandings recently with some of the whales losing their lives.
Wharariki Holiday Park has been running for three years now and is very popular with young back-packers from all around the world. We stayed in a basic cabin but had the use of the communal facilities. Rachel and I took the 20 minute walk across farmland then through the bush and eventually sand dunes down onto Wharariki Beach. Because of the popularity of the Holiday Park the beach now has many more visitors than when we first started to visit the area.
The object of our visit was photography and we did plenty of that. The sky was cloudless so sunset was a bit of a let-down. Although that part of our foray was rather fun in that there were about six or more photographers all lined up with a variety of cameras and gear waiting for the sun to set.
The plan now is to rise before dawn tomorrow in order to re-visit the beach to catch the early morning light.