Going home: In Taranaki, all roads lead to the sublime sea

Welcome to Taranaki, the barbed-wire surfing capital of New Zealand. PATRICK GOWER takes a nostalgic trip around the coast.

The tourism people may have branded it Surf Highway 45 but locals still call it "going down the coast".

State Highway 45, a thick red line on the map that tracks the coastline for well over 100km around Cape Egmont, is the second-choice route through south Taranaki and into Wanganui.

On the map yellow fingers seem to run off the road and reach for the sea, a vision mirrored by the route itself as every right-hand turn heading south from New Plymouth will take you straight to the Tasman Sea.

Heading north from the city, the road ducks inland to cross Mt Messenger and the rugged hill country around it, then spears out to hug the coast again and cross a few estuaries before disappearing into the King Country.

It is up here on State Highway 3 that my journey down to the coast begins.

A mate from Tongaporutu - one of the few landmarks around the blurry Taranaki-King Country border - was keen to be picked up on the trip south until fate intervened.

"I've had a bit of a shocker," he tells me by phone from Auckland's Middlemore Hospital, where he is awaiting surgery.

"I don't know what the hell I was up to."

He was pressing wool in a shearing gang when a strap came loose, flicked around and smashed his eye socket.

Until his accident, my mate was going to play a vital role on the first leg of the trip. The beaches up here are by reputation poor cousins to those in the south of Taranaki; he would have spent most of the time acting as an apologist for his northern coast, which he describes as "a little touch of Taradise".

He reckons the rivermouths of Tongaporutu, Awakino and Mokau have the most prolific spots (or "possies" as he calls them) for whitebait, mai-mai any duck-shooter would die for, and that the dangerous surf is really "just too powerful for some".

He says the shanty-like baches are peacefully free of "Auckland invaders" and the sandy nine-hole golf course behind the rugby club is "a great leveller for the holiday hitter".

But the cherry on the top up this way is the local grog, Mike's Mild Ale from the Whitecliffs Brewery, which is signposted off the state highway and drinkers are welcome to drop by.

Once through to New Plymouth, I pick up another joker for the business end of the trip.

He is a newly qualified medical professional who has come home because he likes the lifestyle of the area, which he does not think outsiders "will ever understand".

There are a few around like him. I know a guy who rates last year's expedition with me to a tiny lagoon on the Sugar Loaf Islands off New Plymouth's Back Beach - a trip ruined by a marauding flock of seagulls and an angry seal pup - as one of his most abiding memories.

I plan to spend hours body-surfing with the boys in big waves off inner-city Fitzroy Beach just like I did as a youngster - morning or night, even in the rain if the waves are right.

But the coastal beaches as we drive south from the city are a bit different again.

While their aficionados - locals and committed surfers - will disagree, I can see how the beauty of black sand beaches may be hard to understand. They are often lonely places with hidden secrets, and remain very much under-used, even by Taranaki people.

There has been a recent push to change this, hence the Surf Highway 45 catchphrase and accompanying promotions - even though signposts are all that are needed.

Once past Oakura, a popular sandy, patrolled beach, many of the best spots are known only by their road names: Weld Rd, Puniho Rd, Stent Rd, Bayly Rd, Kina Rd and so on.

All roads lead to the sea - if you have to go over farmland at the end of these, it always pays to ask the farmer first - and are linked by the highway built across the dairy rich country in days when there was a dairy factory every 25km or so.

Now the century-old buildings of the Okato and Puniho co-op, the Rahotu co-op and many others stand idle, symbols of the speedy rationalisation of the industry.

Even the giant former Kiwi co-op factory that stands at the end of the highway in Hawera has been swallowed by a bigger fish and become an arm - a big arm - of global giant Fonterra.

All the one-horse towns along the coast have seen better days, and even once fiercely parochial rugby clubs have merged for survival.

Opunake and Rahotu are now one club called Coastal, full of farmers keen to follow the path of heroes from down this way such as Graham "Goss" Mourie and Kevin "Smiley" Barrett.

Dairying remains the economic backbone of Taranaki, the balanced coastal climate allowing year-round pasture growth. But a big energy industry makes its presence felt as well.

At Oaonui, the Surf Highway passes the gas production station for the offshore Maui field (with visitors' centre), while inland, white puffy clouds rise from the Kapuni field.

The beaches on the coast can be covered in rockpools or surrounded by sharp, sandy cliff faces.

They are renowned for seafood, and although I have only ever fetched paua, I am told of surfcasters who reel in kahawai and snapper, and of happy whitebaiters.

These beaches all have one thing in common - they are often deserted.

Opunake, in the centre of Surf Highway 45, is the exception. The 1600-population town sits on cliffs high above a safe swimming beach popular with holiday-makers.

The views out to the Tasman Sea from lookouts on the cliffs are spectacular - if you can forget the memory from a few years back of a farmer and his prostitute lover who tortured and murdered his estranged wife, then piled her best friend off a 16m cliff. She survived.

The coast's most famous historical character is probably 19th-century Maori prophet Te Whiti, who led the people of Parihaka in practising the art of passive resistance against invading colonials.

Parihaka is halfway between the sea and Mt Taranaki. Today it is a small settlement with perhaps a few dozen residents.

Plenty of other places boast enduring, if less well-known, tales.

At Ohawe Beach, near the end of the highway at Hawera, a memorial in a paddock describes the 25 men killed in the capture of Otapawa Pa in the 1860s. They included 14-year-old John Foyston, a trumpeter from the Wanganui yeomanry, and a man with the unlikely name of Aricales Economeades.

Taking the slow route along this coast makes you realise that coastal Taranaki is about more than afternoon milking as the school bus drops children home.

There is more beauty and depth to the place than suggested by the Surf Highway name and a reputation as having some of the best breaks in the Southern Hemisphere.

It takes an hour and 15 minutes to drive the route from New Plymouth to Hawera, but they say to see it properly takes two days. It could take much longer than that.

A surfing guy I know pretty much summed it up for me when he explained Taranaki Hardcore, a name first used to describe surfers that has since become a clothing and surfboard brand.

Its symbol includes barbed-wire to represent farmland, wings of freedom to denote the lifestyle, the mountain and surf as "ours to treasure", a cog for the oil industry and the stars of the Southern Cross.

He took this symbol with him round world. And his life dream? To sail home to the 'Naki.

Not a bad dream, I reckon.

* Patrick Gower is a Herald news reporter.