Going sand sailing

Eric Kendall travelled the length of Ninety Mile Beach on New Zealand's North Island in a Blokart a Kiwi-designed sailing dinghy on wheels. You don't know 'fast' until you've done it this way, he writes. Like swooping downhill on a bike, laughing out loud with a mixture of exhilaration, disbelief and terror

THERE'S a strip of sand in the north of New Zealand called Ninety Mile Beach. It's more like 60, as it happens, but that's still a lot of finely crushed seashell.

Amazingly, it's classified as a highway and is driven on daily by tour buses, which seems a waste of surf and sand. Searching for an alternative way to explore the area, I read about the Blokart, a Kiwi-designed sailing dinghy on wheels, and realised the beach and the kart should go together, with me on top.

Although Blokarts are normally rented out at the southern end of the beach for an hour or two's pootling around, I discovered it would be possible to make a guided overnight trip, fishing for my supper and attempting to navigate the entire beach from south to north, to within hiking distance of the tip of New Zealand.

It might take just a few hours of sailing, depending on the wind, or you might not get there at all. That sounded like a proper adventure to me. All I needed was an experienced Blokarter, for sailing tuition en route, and a guide with a 4x4 support vehicle.

Phil O'Kell of Blokart handled the karting side; Marty Benson, of Cape Reinga Adventures, drove the support vehicle, provided camping and fishing gear, and filled the role of a Kiwi Crocodile Dundee.

Near Kaitaia, at the southern end of Ninety Mile Beach, is Taharangi Marie Lodge, a convenient starting point and an extraordinary initiation into Northland's seafood. Most of the food was gently splashing about in the sea until it met the lodge's owner.

Ronnie is not just a rod and line man; for him even scuba diving is about lunch. Which explains the appearance of sea urchins at dinner.

This is not a practical joke, it's the eggs inside the critter you're after, for one of your more pungent encounters with Maori cuisine.

The island's early inhabitants displayed a similar capacity for enjoying seafood, consuming millions of tua-tuas, the shellfish that are still gathered locally at low tide. Half-way along the beach are huge bleached mounds, whose layers reveal communal cooking fires, traces of tools and bones and the shells of everything on the menu across the years.

To reach them there's a sail to be rigged and the low tide to catch. The Blokart's three wheels run fast on wet sand, allowing you to go two or three times the speed of the wind when it's coming from the right quarter.

It usually does - the North Island is just a few miles wide at this point, barely more than a spit of sand between the Tasman Sea and Pacific Ocean - and your take-off can't fail to impress, either you in the driving seat or any of the seagulls and seal pups who happen to be watching. So much power without an engine is hard to believe, as though a huge hand is pushing you smoothly across the sand.

Absurdly simple to drive, even for non-sailors, the Blokart accelerates to ludicrous speeds before you can say, "where are the brakes?" Not that it matters, because there are none. Controls are limited to handle bars which steer the front wheel and a rope to haul in the sail.

Pull it too hard and you'll be wearing the scenery. The instructions for this quite likely event are simple: trust the seat belt and don't stick your arms out, or they will break.

Soaring dunes to your right, crashing waves to your left, the 60 miles of hard sand are broken only by occasional streams cutting clefts across the beach.

These are deep enough to break your Blokart, and you, if you hit them at full tilt. Otherwise it's a carefree ride, fun like your first swooping downhill on a bike, laughing out loud with a mixture of exhilaration, disbelief and terror.

You don't know "fast" until you've done it this way, the smooth sand rushing close by. Only high tide or the calm of nightfall can stop you.

At which point, camping beach-side is the way to go. There's a campsite off the beach at Hokatere but if you have enough freshwater, you can also stay at The Bluff, where Te Wakatehaua Island marks the sole interruption along the entire length of the beach.

There was nothing and no one but the three of us for miles around. With no light pollution and a horizon broken only by the dunes behind and the pillow lava formations of the island to seaward, this was one of the most spectacular views of the southern night skies I'll ever witness.

The isolation and the pounding surf were just as the early Polynesian settlers - the Maori forefathers - experienced it a thousand years ago, having navigated extraordinary distances by sun and stars.

Under the circumstances, failing to catch your dinner feels slightly like letting the ancestral side down and so did the contingency plan: three cans of beans boiled in a saucepan.

The tables turned the next morning. Before breakfast the kahawai - a local coastal fish - were practically throwing themselves at our feet. Locals are sniffy about their taste but freshly fried they were the essence of this wild tip of the North Island.

With perfect wind on our side, the final leg was over almost before it had begun. We ripped towards the looming flax-covered headland, leaving two tour buses trundling in our wake - the only ones we saw during the trip - happy to know that not only were we having more fun than their passengers but we were going faster too.

We reached Scott Point, at the end of this magnificent stretch of sand, within an hour. That left just a hike along the coastal path to Cape Reinga, from where Maori spirits depart for their ancestral homelands.

From this vantage point, with the tremendous mass of the Southern Ocean behind you, and the Pacific and Tasman Sea sweeping across the remaining points of the compass, it's easy to feel the power of the place. As for the Blokarting: "It's over, Rover," was the way Marty saw it. Unless you turn round and sail back for some more of Ronnie's cooking.