Raglan's got soul, that's for real

When I was a teenager growing up in Hamilton, we'd drive for miles to the Coromandel beaches. Even though Raglan was just over the hill, nobody ever thought of going there.

Whangamata and Mount Maunganui were the favourites and looking back, I can see it was colour prejudice. Black sand beaches seemed somehow inferior. They didn't look as pretty as those resorts with white sand and aquamarine sea.

The west coast beaches were rugged and tough - places where swimming was like being put through the heavy duty cycle in your washing machine. The breakers would pummel and pound you before spitting you out, spent and exhausted, on to the beach, whereas the warm waters of the Pacific allowed you to bob gently over undulating swells and when the surf was really up, permit the occasional body surf to shore.

Now, I would give anything to have a place at Raglan but, as with coastal towns everywhere, prices have gone all Ponsonby. A two bedroom cottage at the harbour end of town - no sea views but a short walk to the harbour inlet? You can start thinking about it at $500,000. And anywhere with beach access begins at $1 million.

So clearly there were some people with the nouse to appreciate Raglan's beauty. And yet, despite the surge in house prices, Raglan hasn't become trendy - yet. The Harbour View Hotel is still the only two-storey building in town, although the wonderful garden bar which was like the back lawn of a mate's place and where, if you were lucky, you'd find Midge Marsden jamming on a Sunday afternoon, is concreted over now and covered with a pagoda.

The cafes are now serving more than fish and chips and pies, although you'll still find brilliant fish and chips at the Salt Rock Cafe at the end of the main drag. Vinnies, Tongue and Groove and the Aqua Velvet all offer soy lattes, paninis, vegetarian and vegan options and Raglan now has a little sushi bar, a pizzeria and a Thai restaurant.

And yet for all that, Raglan isn't slick. The only Porsche driver I saw while I was in town looked like he might have won it in a lottery. The hippies still outnumber the yuppies and the only blondes you'll find in this town have had their hair bleached by the sun, not by Raymonde of Remuera. The township swells from around 3000 permanent residents to more than 15,000 during the Christmas holiday period, or to put it another way, the Raglan Four Square goes from selling 350 loaves of bread a day to well over 1000.

The locals take it all in their stride. It appears hard to get them upset unless you're a proponent of sand mining. That has galvanised the locals into forming an action group - Kiwis Against Sand Mining - and every shop window has a poster warning mining companies to keep away from their beach. Apart from that, though, they're a cruisy bunch.

Raglan's a town of artists, surfers and massage therapists. Judging from the ads in the shop windows, I'm willing to bet that there are more massage therapists here per capita than anywhere else in the country. It's a town whose main street is just a couple of hundred metres long, leading straight down to the harbour, yet it boasts four art galleries, a herbal dispensary clinic, a Trade Aid store, a yoga centre and a shoe store selling handcrafted leather sandals.

It's also a town of beautiful children - mocha coloured, curly haired with piercing blue or green eyes. They must put something in the water. I was visiting Raglan for the first time in years to finally, finally, attend the Raglan Surfing School. I'd always wanted to learn to surf, ever since I was a 17-year-old in a muslin skirt and shell necklace, stranded on the shore with the labrador, the bags and the surf wax.

But surfing was a man's world back then and I didn't have the chutzpah to muscle my way in. So, 24 years later, I was living the dream - $79 bought me a three-hour group lesson (one hour on land, two on the water) and a guarantee that if I wasn't standing up by the end of the lesson, I could come back the next day.

Rock and Stockie were our tutors - there's a five-to-one student tutor ratio - and they knew their stuff. There are private lessons available but the group seemed like much more fun. I was the oldest - the others ranged from 30 down to 12 - but I wasn't the oldest they'd ever had. Apparently a 76-year-old woman from England had stunned them all by taking to surfing like the grooviest little grommet. So that gave me hope.

The fact that we would be in chest-high water, surfing waves that had already broken, was also reassuring. Raglan is justifiably famous for its surf - apparently Manu Bay has the best left-hand break in the world, which meant nothing to me. All I knew was that those waves were big and scary, and I didn't want to get in the way of the awesome surfers who had travelled the world to be there. So when the boys told us we'd be heading to Ngaranui Beach, the swimming beach, and having the lesson just outside of the patrolled area, I breathed a sigh of relief. As did the mothers of the two 12-year-old girls.

The walk down to Ngaranui Beach is now paved, not the goat track I remembered, but the view still takes your breath away. There's nothing subtle about west coast beaches. They're raw and they're bare and they're nowhere near tamed. But their stark beauty is absolutely jaw-dropping. I don't think you ever get used to it, even if you are a local.

Once Rock and Stockie had us in our wetsuits and in the shallow water with our soft longboards, it was time to put the lessons into practice. The theory's pretty simple; lie on the board, paddle like buggery when you feel the wave coming, one, two, three strokes, then in one fluid motion, leap to your feet, squat slightly sitting into your bum, and look ahead to the shore.

The 12-year-olds, who were built like racing whitebait, were up in a flash, like they were born to it. For the older ones among us, it took a little longer. One fluid motion is all very well and good, but big boobs and stiff joints meant that the nana option was the better one for me; a two-step progression that sees you kneel, then stand. And once I'd been shown that, I was off. The exhilaration when you realise that you're standing and you're in control took me back to that childhood memory of riding a bike for the first time. The freedom! The excitement! The utter jubilation!

One by one, we all got to our feet, some taking longer than others but all eventually getting there and sharing in each other's sense of achievement. Everybody had a grin a mile wide and we felt like we'd joined some exclusive club. We were surfers! Admittedly on soft longboards, admittedly on the broken waves, admittedly wobbly surfers, but hey - who's going to quibble over the minor details.

The rest of the group went back to Karioi for a complimentary sauna to ease aching muscles most of us didn't know existed but I had to head back to Auckland and back to work. I'd done what I'd come to do, and that was to stand up on a surfboard. But I'll be back. The township, the art galleries, the cafes, the festivals, the people, the surf - it's a magical place. If you don't get Raglan, you've got no soul.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY