Te Arai North begins at the sea and keeps leaving it. That is the first thing to understand about the course, and maybe the most romantic. Plenty of seaside golf spends its whole length flirting with the water. This one turns its back on the Pacific, walks into the trees, and trusts you to wait for the ocean's return. The land sits at Tomarata, three miles down the coast from Tara Iti, the member-only club Tom Doak designed in 2015. Ric Kayne bought this ground in 2012 intending to build a public-facing resort. Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw got the first turn, and their eye-popping South Course opened in 2022. A year later the North arrived, Doak's third original design in New Zealand and his most recent. Kayne and managing partner Jim Rohrstaff own and operate the two courses, which alternate daily, one day for members and their accompanied guests, the next for resort guests and green-fee players. Anyone willing to make the trip can eventually stand on either. The North had the less opulent inheritance, without the same expanse of picturesque oceanfront dunes. But less opulent is not the same as less interesting. Built as an antithesis to both the South and Doak's own Tara Iti, the North sent Doak and his team mainly inland, where they worked big. They etched bold contours across broad topography and timed each ocean reveal for just the right moment. The routing runs from the coast into the forest along tree-lined fescue, then swings back out toward Little Barrier Island at the 8th. The back nine repeats the pattern, heading inland again before the final three holes return to the coast for a dramatic seaside finish. You get the ocean at the beginning, middle, and end, and the hours between are meant to make you miss it. That order was not the first plan. The 7th, 8th, and 9th were once meant to come after the current 16th. The worry was simple and human: some of the longest walks would have been saved for the last few holes. So the holes moved forward. New Zealand's strict Covid quarantine meant Doak relied heavily on the people on the ground: longtime associate Brian Slawnik, along with shapers Angela Moser and Clyde Johnson, two gifted architects who have worked with him on many of his recent projects. Doak himself climbed back onto a bulldozer, a rarity these days, in anticipation of his High Pointe revival. He rough-shaped the greens at the 4th and 7th, two of the most dramatic holes on the property. At times the course feels like a throwback, carrying a boldness that recalls Ballyneal and Old Macdonald, built by a crew that straddles Doak's past and present. What they made is golf of huge, undulating fairways leading into twisting greens, with rolling contours inside and around them. Find one side of a slope and the result is one thing; find the other and it is something dramatically different. It can leave you scratching your head. It also lingers, the shot you want to try again, and then again. Superintendent Nick O'Brien has cultivated an immaculate wall-to-wall fescue surface, and between that and the water at the start, the turn, and the close, there isn't much else to ask for. Beside the fifth green and sixth tee sits a huge Maori hill fort, a pa. It is not directly in play, and the local tribe gave the go-ahead for it to be incorporated into the design. You stand on the sixth tee in its company for a moment. Then you walk on, through the trees, toward the sea you know is coming back.