Cape Reinga is not New Zealand's northernmost point. That distinction belongs to the Surville Cliffs at North Cape, some 30 kilometres east and marginally further north. Yet it is here, at Te Rerenga Wairua, that the country appears to end. Every bus tour from Paihia to Cape Reinga tour crosses roughly 210 kilometres of the Aupōuri Peninsula to reach it, following State Highway 1 until the seal gives out above the Tasman Sea. The Far North surrenders its roads slowly: the final stretch to the cape was sealed only in 2010, a project costing some 32 million dollars that ended decades of dust and corrugation. In Māori tradition the headland is a threshold rather than a terminus. The name translates as the leaping place of spirits. Wairua travel north along Te Oneroa-a-Tōhē — the beach charted on maps as Ninety Mile Beach, though it measures closer to 88 kilometres — before descending the roots of a solitary pōhutukawa said to be more than 800 years old. From there they turn toward Manawatāwhi, the Three Kings Islands, and onward to Hawaiki. The tree still clings to the cliff face below the lookout. It has never been recorded in flower. Ngāti Kuri hold mana whenua across this land and ask that no food be eaten on the point. Below the cape, the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean over the Columbia Bank, a shallow reef where opposing currents raise standing waves of up to ten metres in a heavy swell. The collision is visible from the headland: a seam of broken water running out from the point. The lighthouse above it has burned since 1941, when it replaced the exposed Motuopao Island station. Its light was automated in 1987 and is monitored remotely. The tower stands ten metres tall and 165 metres above the sea. The signpost beside it gives London at 18,029 kilometres and the South Pole at 4,801. Entry remains free — 0 NZD for the cape and lighthouse area — and the site sits inside the Te Paki Recreation Reserve, co-governed with Ngāti Kuri. That combination of sacred ground, open reserve and a road that simply stops explains why bus tour from Paihia to Cape Reinga tours have run north for decades, alongside Ninety Mile Beach coach journeys and Cape Reinga cultural trips that read the peninsula as genealogy rather than scenery.