Ok so my blog posts to date have focused mainly on my own physical experience of spending five days walking along a beach without to much about the beach itself. One reason for this is that there was a lot more going on with me than on the beach, but that isn't to say there was nothing to see.
Obviously the beach is LOOOOOONG, but it subtly changes as you walk mile after mile (NB: I know we're metric, but "kilometre after kilometre" just doesn't have the same ring to it!). Every day, depending on the time and cloud cover the sea changes colour, varying in shades of blue and green. There are a lot of different seabirds including gulls, oyster catchers (black and pied), pied stilts, sandpipers, godwits, cormorants, curiously enough kingfishers (one followed me for a bout half a K, flitting ahead in about 30m intervals), and a few birds about the size of a gull that look more like a tern, with a black face. There's also these little brown birds, I don't know, they might be sparrows, that fly up out of the dunes into the wind, flapping as hard as they can to stay stationary for as long as they can, singing their little hearts out.
The dunes vary from being low and rolling and covered in marram grass, to high and storm-ravaged, to a range of shapes with no vegetation and wind-rippled patterns. Their are a number of different microhabitats, from barren sand to grassy, to hollows with lupins, succulents and wild flowers, and even pockets of marshy reeds.
Sand, especially wet sand, is a pain that gets everywhere and sticks to everything. That said, there's nothing quite like lying on the dry sand (out of the wind) and running your hands through it, feeling every individual sand grain tingling against your fingertips.
I really like that I spent five days walking along the same beach and saw a grand total of three ships, and fishing boats at that. I remember passing through Surfer's Paradise (at least I think it was there) a few years back and counting over twenty freighters out at sea while standing in the same spot!
One odd thing about the beach was how clean it was. That isn't to say there isn't rubbish; it collects in pockets and is particularly concentrated around streams outlets. There's also the odd bit of unidentifiable flotsam (some of it quite large) that has obviously come in from the ocean and during its journey across the sea has become home to numerous strange tube-worm-like bivalves which now hang from it dead/dying where they've washed up upon the sand. Other walkers have played "count the dead fur seals" but I only saw one, right near the start. Unfortunately no live seals and looking out to sea as fairly often I never managed to spot a dolphin or anything of that sort. There were several dead seabirds on the beach though, one buried up to its head with only the shoulder of one wing and its beak protruding from the sand like some strange macabre sculpture. There's the odd patch of seaweed and every couple of kilometers a sizable log. But other than that, at least at this time, the beach stretches on and on and predominantly empty sand.
The least pleasant thing about the beach is the wind, the constant wind that it is almost impossible to escape from, even behind larger dunes. It peels your face and chills your bones, and haunts your dreams. Curiously the sound of the wind and the waves changes depending on what side you're lying on. I think my hearing must be better in one ear than the other as there were a couple of times I rolled over in my tent and startled at the sudden change in intensity in the noise of the wind and the surf, particularly on nights when I camped in the dunes and was conscious of the fact that if there was a tsunami a) I wouldn't know until it hit and b) I'd be a gonner.
And on that note...it's off to the forest for me!
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