Hot beach, cold surf

Exploring the Coromandel Peninsular is something that I’d definitely recommend for photography and hiking fans alike. After my walking joy and hot water beach disappointment (link) I zipped across the country to Raglan, supposedly the surf capital of New Zealand and famous for it’s left hand breaks – whatever that means. Two very good reasons for this cross-country switch – one was that it was Ally’s birthday a room-mate from Auckland who also arrived via real-gap, and the other was to get a surf lesson.
We discovered that Raglan is not a party town, by any stretch of the imagination. Friday night – half ten, and almost everywhere was closed or emptying. We made the best of it though so it wasn’t too bad.
The surf lesson was quite an experience. Just getting to the sea was a mission, the beach had black sand and so got damn hot in the NZ sun! I mean to the point that you have to run to the sea. It’s like walking hot coals before you’ve started!!
Getting up onto the board and standing up was very easy – on dry land. On a wave however things were rather different. This is assuming that you’ve chosen a good wave, gotten onto the board (we didn’t go beyond feet on the bottom depth) before the wave was too close or passed and then actually roughly matched speed with the wave in time. After slightly more than two hours in the water I think I managed to try and stand up about four times, maybe more I wasn’t counting.
It was quite a cool experience if short lived. The very salty water being forced into every face hole did put a bit of a dampener on the whole thing and put me off jumping straight back on the following day – it was an option. I think I would try it again but only if I either earn some more money or can do it for free.
I left Raglan without saying goodbye properly to Ally, which was a shame, she was surfing and I had to get on to my next destination. Rotorua the place of all things adrenaline, the aim – Zorbing.