Along the scenic road to Karekare are many nice houses. I can imagine to live in some of them. But that was not a reason to drive along. We wanted to see famous beach Karekare.

The beach is visible from distance, just before you turn left from main road going on top of hills. It is stunning from distance and even better when you are there.

We walked along the beach, wind helped us to cool down. It was very nice. Much nicer than movie Piano shows it (part of it has been filmed here), but they needed bad weather for the movie, while we needed good one, obviously.

Karekare waterfalls

Unfortunately the beach was exactly as described in Lonely Planet - huge waves, so we did not go into water. At least not into sea. Instead we dipped ourselves into small pool below Karekare waterfalls nearby. It was very nice.

I guess the main point of this waterfalls is to take photos of people in it, because we were not alone doing so. Shortly after us came a pair, they showed us it is possible to take a camera into water, while we tried to make photos only from a shore. Good idea, let's get into water once more.

And then another group of people came, standing, waiting, not doing anything. Only later we realized they are probably waiting until we leave. They started "moving" immediately when we started to pack our things. We seen them only short time later on parking lot so they also wanted just to take couple of photos and somehow they did not want any audience :-)

Piha Beach

We were bit late so we did not go to other side of hills - to Piha. We just took couple of photos from hill and returned to Auckland. It was our last day in New Zealand and we wanted to actually see some big city in NZ...

To compensate only one photo from Piha Beach I am providing a panorama.

Auckland

We wandered around centre, had nice dinner at waterfront restaurant and visited Sky Tower. It was definitely one of those experiences I will remember (and no, we did not jump from it, but I guess I would remember it better that way).

Panorama of Auckland from bridge.

Jumping from Sky Tower seems to be quite popular. During whole our stay up there people were falling down every 3 minutes (or 5?).
    

Some views from Sky Tower. Tinted glass did not make it easy to take photos. At least it is quite easy to fix it when shooting RAW (still it was lot of work and not every photo was successful).

And finally, a panorama from Sky Tower. Trip in New Zealand is over, it is time to move into South America.