Te Puia Hot Springs Golf Club

Few golf experiences in New Zealand place you quite so completely inside the landscape as a round at Te Puia Hot Springs Golf Club. The course sits in Tokomaru Bay on the East Coast of the North Island — one of the country's most geographically remote stretches of coastline, where the Raukūmara Range meets the Pacific and small communities carry deep Māori cultural roots. The bay itself is dramatic: steep bush-clad hills, a black-sand beach, and an ocean horizon that fills every pause between shots.

The club takes its name from the geothermal springs at Te Puia, a feature that speaks to the volcanic character of this corner of Aotearoa. Like many rural East Coast clubs, it operates on the kind of volunteer goodwill and community loyalty that keeps grassroots New Zealand golf alive, offering a genuinely unpretentious round in surroundings that a destination resort could never manufacture.

The Gisborne region, the first place on earth to see each new day's sun, has a quiet confidence about it, and golf here reflects that. Visitors tend to arrive by accident and leave remembering the place for years.