Your Piha beach tour, bush to black sand.

Our recommended Piha beach tour fills 5 hours: an English-speaking guide collects you in Auckland and brings you back. Its listing describes walking the bush tracks of a rainforest in the Waitakere Ranges, seeing native palms, giant tree ferns and an ancient kauri, and walking on the soft black sand of Piha Beach.

The day closes with a kiwi-style afternoon tea, a detail several recent guests remember fondly, from the tea and honey to a rainbow over the beach. Food for lunch is on you, at a stop made for that purpose. A few dollars in your pocket covers it. No special fitness is needed: the operator rates it for everyone. Comfortable shoes for the forest are the only real requirement.

From $118, your seat can be reserved with payment deferred, and withdrawing 24 hours or more ahead returns the lot. Pickup covers a list of hotels; if yours is not on it, the provider asks you to get in touch to see whether pickup can be arranged. Our other pages cover prices, getting there, things to do, the nearby beaches, places to stay and surf safety.

The hills between Auckland and the sea are the Waitakere Ranges, home to 16,000 hectares of native forest, bush walks and rugged coastline, by the regional tourism agency's count. Their Māori name, Te Wao Nui o Tiriwa, translates as the Great Forest of Tiriwa. These hills are the ancestral home of Te Kawerau ā Maki, whose lineage reaches back to the first people to settle here. A towering carved pou of their ancestors stands at the entrance to Arataki, high on Scenic Drive.

The forest you walk through today has a hard history. For nearly a century the ranges were milled for kauri timber and cleared for farming, and many of Auckland's old villas were built from that kauri. The trees that survive are giants: the Department of Conservation says kauri can grow over 50 m tall and live for more than 2,000 years.

They face a new threat. Kauri dieback is caused by a soil-borne pathogen that attacks the trees through their roots, and there is no known cure. That is why walkers are asked to stay on open tracks and to clean their shoes at the hygiene stations at trailheads, and why some tracks in the ranges have been closed.

Lunch is the one thing to plan. The tour does not include it, and it stops at a place where you can buy your own food if you want to. Bring some money for it, and maybe a snack for the walk, since the afternoon tea comes towards the end of the day. A refillable water bottle is worth having too, as the forest can be humid even on a cool day.

If you come back on your own, the village has a couple of good options. The Piha Store is a cafe and small grocery that sells freshly baked pies and sandwiches, and it caters to all dietary requirements. Up at the clubhouse there is a bar and dining room, and Tourism New Zealand also floats the idea of a beach picnic.

The surf club restaurant lists burgers, tacos, curry and the catch of the day, with tables inside and out. It is a relaxed place to end a beach day with a view of the surf, open every day of the week by its own account. Sitting there with the lifeguards' tower in sight is a reminder of how much of village life turns around the beach and the club.