The best waterfalls in Auckland

Location: Kitekite Falls Track, Piha (West Auckland, about 40 minutes drive from the city)

A dreamy three-tier waterfall plunging into a lush valley. When you reach the end of the track, it really feels like stepping into a scene from a movie, and kids often react with pure excitement.

Forest, stream, and wooden bridges are all part of the walk. The scenery is immersive the whole way, and it feels more like a nature playground where you can explore and occasionally splash through shallow water.

There's something about Hunua that gets you almost the second you step onto the track. You're maybe forty-five minutes out of the city, past the last of the suburbs and into forest and farmland, and then you park up and the noise just switches off. Green light filtering down through the canopy, wet earth and leaves in the air, birds doing their thing overhead. If you've had a week of concrete and fluorescent lighting, this is about as fast as therapy gets.

It's also, unglamorously, one of the better workouts you'll get without a gym membership. The Cossey-Massey loop barely has a flat metre in it. It's stairs or slope, slope or stairs, the whole way round, and your heart rate goes up and stays up in a way that a treadmill facing a wall never quite manages, because there's always something new to look at instead of a countdown timer.

I've done this one twice now, once as the full loop and once on a shorter, lazier, cloudy-day version, and between the two visits I picked up a few things I wish someone had told me before I went the first time.