Postcards from New Zealand: Day Forty-Eight

This morning, we got a surprise call that a friend's beach house in Tairua was free for us to use. Tairua is on the Pacific Coast of the Coromandel Peninsula, and it is so beautiful there that you cannot stand it. When we got there, just before sunset, the tide was out. Most of the harbor is so shallow that, when the tide goes out, the sea leaves behind vast expanses of sand, made reflective here and there by licks of inch-deep water. When the tide comes back in, everything brown turns blue.