Omaha, the beach, is a particularly lovely stretch of white sand, one of those perfect crescents on the east coast of the North Island with gentle rolling surf that’s never too large but always seems quite nicely formed. Omaha, the settlement, dates back to the 1980s, when the northern end of the bay was developed for housing, followed by a large development in the early 2000s where a number of sophisticated beach houses have been built in recent years.
Like many New Zealand beach-side settlements, the streets aren’t exactly pretty: baches, like our houses, grow ever larger, craning over each other, pushing up inside height-to-boundary rules to clutch at a peep of view, placing living rooms on the second level for the same reason, even though the place is dead…
