Daily Photo – The Amazing Colours of Pareora Beach

There is a specific kind of magic in the “in-between” places on New Zealand’s State Highway 1. Before reaching Oamaru, I decided not to join the busloads of people at the Moeraki Boulders and in Oamaru I detoured away from the white stone streets of the town. Just before Timaru, though, I saw a sign that read ‘Pareora’, a place about which I knew nothing and had never even heard of. No wonder. It is a tiny community tucked beside the Pacific Ocean, with a coastal landscape stripped back to its purest elements: a vast sky, a turquoise sea, and a shore of smooth, charcoal-grey stones.

What struck me first was the palette. I often think of beaches as golden, but here there was something deeply healing and magical about the cool tones of the stony shore. The dark pebbles made the Pacific Ocean look almost neon, a glacial blue that felt as though it belonged in a painting.

There are no cafés, no crowds, and no noise other than the rhythmic crunch, crunch, crunch of stones being dragged by the tide. I stood for a while, feeling the sun-warmed stones in my hand and breathing in the salt air.

New Zealand is famous for its grand mountains and deep fjords, but sometimes it is the minimal horizons that linger longest in the mind, and this was one of them. It was quite marvelous. It felt like standing at the edge of the world, where the only thing left to do is breathe.