Cape Reinga occupies the northwestern tip of the Aupouri Peninsula, a long finger of land at the top of New Zealand's North Island. The nearest town, Kaitaia, is more than 100 kilometers to the south. Here the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean converge, and on rough days you can see the collision -- two bodies of water meeting in a visible line of turbulence and competing currents. The cape sits exposed to weather from every direction, swept by a mild oceanic climate that keeps temperatures remarkably stable year-round but delivers generous rainfall. This is one of the most remote points of mainland New Zealand, yet more than 500,000 visitors make the journey each year, a number growing at roughly five percent annually since the road to the cape was fully sealed.

For Maori, Cape Reinga is not a tourist destination. It is a sacred site where the physical world meets the spiritual one. According to Maori mythology, when a person dies their spirit travels northward along the length of the North Island to this headland. The journey ends at the ancient pohutukawa tree, whose gnarled roots reach down the cliff face toward the sea. The spirits descend through these roots into the ocean, entering the underworld to return to Hawaiki -- the ancestral Polynesian homeland from which the Maori voyaged to New Zealand centuries ago. Before departing entirely, the spirits turn at the Three Kings Islands for a final glimpse of Aotearoa. The sacredness of this site means visitors are asked to treat the area with particular respect, and Ngati Kuri, the local iwi, actively works to protect the cape's spiritual significance.

A lighthouse has guided ships around this treacherous cape since 1879, when the first light was built on nearby Motuopao Island. The current lighthouse, constructed on the headland itself in 1941, was automated in 1987 and its keepers withdrawn. The original 1,000-watt light with its revolving Fresnel lens -- an elegant piece of Victorian optical engineering -- has been replaced by a tiny 50-watt flashing beacon lodged in the huge lantern housing. The contrast is almost comic: an enormous lighthouse structure now powered by a light smaller than a household bulb. But the beacon does its job, marking the point where the Tasman and Pacific currents make navigation dangerous and where the spirits, needing no light at all, have been finding their way for far longer than any lighthouse has stood.

Cape Reinga serves as the northern terminus of Te Araroa, the 3,000-kilometer hiking trail that runs the length of New Zealand from Bluff in the far south to this headland in the far north. For through-hikers who have spent months walking the trail, arriving at the cape carries a weight that goes beyond physical accomplishment. They reach a place that Maori have understood as an ending for centuries -- the point of departure, the threshold between worlds. Suitable vehicles can also approach along Ninety Mile Beach and up the Te Paki Stream bed, a route that feels less like a road and more like an act of faith. However you arrive, the cape delivers the same stark geography: headland, ocean, wind, and that ancient tree holding its ground above the place where the spirits go.