Mōkau has all the essential elements to make it a worthy road trip destination. Remote, mysterious, a dramatic land and seascape, full of great stories. In every epic adventure yarn, our hero must traverse a portal of big-time danger to reach a new place of very different dimensions and prospects, and so progress to the stirring denouement of the tale. Lara has to do it in Tomb Raider. Princess Leia in Star Wars, many times. Alan Quartermain and Co, too, in King Solomon’s Mines. Indiana Jones in just about every canyon he encounters.
And so it is with visiting the Mōkau River, which debouches on the wild west coast of Te Ika a Māui and defines the border between the Waikato and Taranaki. It’s the second-longest river in the North Island, rising in the Pureora Forest before winding down through spectacular limestone country and through a by Geoff Park, a seminal book on New Zealand’s ecological history). Like so many west coast rivers, it has a dangerous bar at its entrance to the sea and commands much respect from any sailor’s perspective.