We bought (indigestible) fish and chips in Foxton and parked the night on the beach front. Astonishingly, this huge beach is empty, as you can see, despite this being Good Friday, the start of the last public holiday before the Kiwi winter. The car park had no minatory signs and we were very comfortable there for the night.
Foxton was originally named Manawatu after the river which reaches the sea here, but was renamed after Sir William Fox, several times Prime Minister in the 1860's to 1880's. He was a rabid teeotaller, and in many ways responsible for the appalling conduct of the Pakeha government in the land wars of Taranaki. He also at one point 'adopted' a small Maori boy, known as Ngatau 'William Fox' Omahuru, who in fact had been abducted (age 6) from the site of Battle of the Beak of the Bird in 1969. Here government forces were defeated, but one of the Maori allies took the child. Although his father and mother later sought to get him back, Fox refused and brought the child up in his own home. Later, he was apprenticed to the hard-line lawyer Buller, who was heavily involved in the dodgy dealings that prompted later land battles. In the end Omahuru abandoned his Pakeha upbringing, seemingly disgusted by the way the law was being flouted and abused, and became the adviser to the great non-violent activist Te Whiti. He stood alongside Te Whiti during the last desperate struggles, but then fades from historical view.