From Ambury Regional Park’s Visitor Reception area, head straight down towards the Manukau foreshore and the kissing gates that mark the Park’s SW boundary. Cameron the draughthorse is the main resident on this stretch.

Beyond the kissing gates you’ll see the first signage of the Mangere Foreshore track, opened in 2005 as part of Watercare’s Manukau foreshore rehabilitation.

2.5kms later, you pass the Mangere Lagoon, part of the Auckland volcanic field. In the 1960s, earthworks for the Mangere Sewage Works sludge ponds in the lagoon damaged the scoria cone at the centre of this explosion crater, and the crater itself.  The sewage works handled Auckland’s waste for 40 years. Its sludge ponds stood on this shore, and its oxidation ponds webbed the sea on the right-hand side of the track all the way out to Puketutu Island.

Walk on another kilometre and you’ll see version 2 of the old sewage works, Watercare’s  Wastewater Treatment Plant, opened in 2003. Thirteen hours processing by clarifiers and ultra violet radiation now treats what used to take, by sludge settlement and oxidation, 21 days. These days the sterile solids are trucked away, and the sterile fluids are released on the outgoing tide at the rate of 25 tonnes a second, Auckland's biggest river.

Cross the road beyond the plant, head left a short distance up the footpath, and the track then branches right again, skirting dumpgrounds and passing along an avenue of pines, to emerge out at the shoreline again at Oruarangi Creek. (T, P).

Across the pedestrian bridge, a galvanised gate lets you onto a nicely gravelled path that leads past a bird hide, and past white-shell beaches. The overall walk features two bird hides, and you'll pass roost islands that host godwits, lesser knots, wrybills, spoonbills and the distinctive red at-arms slope of the oyster-catchers' bright bills.

By now the Otuataua Stonefields are in sight - a good, emphatic, heaped finish. Volcanic vents once effervesced here, and Maori moved in later to trap the sun's warmth, piling up these stones and expanding their kumara-growing season. The Maori garden mounds, the storage pits, and the drystone walls of later Pakeha farmers are still prominent in this area.

Head through a galvanised gate into the Stonefields, and various paths wind through the old remnants of a previous culture. The Stonefields’ paths exit onto Ihumatao Quarry Road.