Very early, we arrived at Auckland. Rain. Darkness. And hot coffee. Then we took our car and followed Highway 1 south. Left-side traffic. More cars and more confusion. She was nervous, and I drove like a beginner. And we made it - to Raglan, our first stop in New Zealand.

We immediately felt in love with this country. The road from Hamilton to the sea passed farms, small waterfalls, big hills and bigger farn trees. We were tired, but hungry. Hungry to see more of this, and then we stood at the top of a hill, overseeing the coast and the city.

Raglan is a small city, a few roads, a few more houses, two or three cafés, two or three shops. All closes at 4.pm, but we didn’t care - we wanted to get to the waterfront. Somebody recommended Raglan as a good place to surf, and we wondered where we could do so. We stood at the beach and everything was flat. Not again, we said, not again. Maybe we are blind, maybe we can’t see the waves and the surfers in the water, they are there, they are there…

In the late afternoon, we met a guy from a surf school. Our last hope - if not him, if not here, we would never make it into the water with a board. He said no problem, he said we would have fun. Four other guys joined us as we took off with a car a few kilometers south.

At the camp (it was a hut), we joined an even bigger group of about 20 young scholars. They took also their first surf lesson and we came together in a very old gym hall to find out the basics of surfing. That was funny, somehow, and I felt good, because standing at the board to demonstrate the proper standing technique, I was a pro surfer with dozens of years experience. Except the stand at the board, we didn’t learn much more from our instructors.

And then, we lined up at the beach, wearing full-body wetsuits, she and me, and all the others, ready to join the waves. They seemed to be small, and we ran into the water. Exhaustion after 50 m, water in ears and eyes, left and right fighting surfers, everywhere. How to catch a wave? How to stand up on this shaky board? We never had time to think, as the first waves rolled over us, at Raglan.

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