The change in the landscape as I approached Auckland put me in mind of driving back into Johannesburg after spending a few weeks in the veldt: the nearer you get to the big city, the more traffic there is, the wider the roads are, the more obvious is man's presence on the surface of this earth. And yet it all happens so gradually that you don't realise it's going on until, suddenly, you wake from whatever reverie the smooth hum of the bus engine has lulled you into and look out over suburban sprawl, out-of-town shopping complexes and crowds of people.

I was met at the bus station by Kerry, Amanda's sister's husband, who drove me home to his wife Lynley and their kids Ella, Conor & baby Logan. What a lovely family! They gave me shelter over the following days of torrential downpours and were delightful company - although anyone who has met Conor will agree (his parents do)that it would be great if you could fit young boys with a volume control!

The weather for the rest of the week precluded any exploration of the city, so instead I "kicked back" as they say in this hemisphere, resting my weary feet and spending quality time with the Fordes. There was food, beer, wine, jigsaws, and pleasant company. Once again I am bowled over by the hospitality of Kiwis.

On Saturday I decided to brave the hostile elements and make my way to Whangarei, the main town in Northland and also the base for diving trips to the Poor Knights Islands. These islands were one of the favourite diving spots of the late Jacques Cousteau, and I wanted to dive there - if only to have another dive after almost six months above water. The town itself is a little dreary, and the backpackers I chose was more than a little dreary; but at least the bed was comfortable. The guy that picked me up from the bus stop to take me to the backpackers had his hand in plaster; when I asked what had happened he told me he had "got into a spot of trouble" with someone. Hm.

Early on Sunday morning I stole out of the dorm (so as not to wake the two young guys in there with me, of which one was a crazy Maori guy who told me all about the best way to kill pigs and how to catch crayfish by hand) and waited in the silence of the the traffic-free road for my ride up to Tutukaka beach and the Dive! Tutukaka shop. After a 25 minute drive out to the coast, we were given wetsuits and whatnot and headed to the marina and our tiny boat. It maybe wouldn't have been tiny if there were only three of us, but in fact there were twelve paying passengers plus two crew which made things a little tight.

The diving more than made up for the discomfort of having to rotate seating opportunities (the worst aspect of which was that the standing area was barely protected from the biting rain). The first dive site was called Magic Wall, and I will always remember it as the first time I've dived in a kelp field. There were nudibranchs and wrasse aplenty, but not many of the bigger fish I was hoping to see. Apparently, the current here comes directly from the tropical waters of Polynesia. But I'll be buggered if 15 degrees is tropical in my book!

The second dive was absolutely spectacular. We were at Blue Maomao Arch, which is an underwater arch full of Blue Maomao fish - so quite a good name for it really. This was one of Jacques Cousteau's top ten dive sites in the world, and it's easy to see why: the arch is effectively the 40 metre aisle of a marine cathedral, where huge boulders are strewn across its floor are teeming with life of all sorts. The visibility was impeccable, and the waters in the heart of the cavern were electric blue - we're talking the blue of those see-through Lego blocks they used for spaceships and police cars - because a crevasse in the rock overhead allows a shaft of daylight to enter and cast its rays through the fishy multitudes. I was so amazed at all I saw around me, I nearly forgot how bloody cold it was! Only my numb toes bore silent testimony to the ambient temperature.

I was truly exhausted after these two dives - my first since Malaysia in April - and managed to fall asleep on the trip back, even though (according to my fellow passengers) my head was bouncing off the pilot's seat with each cresting of a wave. I'm so glad I dived here. The initial panic of my first thirty seconds back in the water soon gave way to a sense of knowing what I was doing and enjoying it too.

There was even less going on in Whangarei on Sunday night than there had been on Saturday night (where at least I had found a cafe with comfy seats where I could have a latte and read my book), so it was early to bed and early to rise the next day. My bus back to civilisation - er, I mean Auckland - left at nine o'clock. Lynley kindly picked me up at the other end and drove me out to her house in Mairangi Bay, on Auckland's North Shore. I had a couple of hours' chat and then I borrowed her car to drive to Howick, east of Auckland, and meet a cousin I never knew I had. Al left the UK some sixty years ago (as some of you are aware, my family is an extended one and at 31 I am the youngest of all the cousins, the oldest being in his eighties) and hasn't been back to the UK since 1974. It was lovely meeting him, his wife Maureen and some of their family.

Saturday was another glorious day in New Plymouth. I got up, spent a bit of time with Brenda's grandson Oliver (who was visiting his gran this weekend) - he is nine years old and a good lad - and then walked back into town, this time along the scenic Huateki Walk which follows the path of a small stream into the heart of the town. I bought some new walking boots, my old ones having developed serious holes after the volcano walk of the day before, and then promptly broke them in by walking west out of town along the beach promenade. Incidentally the owner of the outdoor kit shop was a really nice guy, and we spent ages chatting about this & that, especially stories from when they were filming The Last Samurai here (ironically, they didn't use Taranaki to stand in for Fuji even though they are almost identical).

When I reached the hill known as Putakiku I scrambled up to the top, where I was rewarded with fabulous views of Taranaki (almost cloudless), the beaches stretching south & east, and the town itself. But my feet were knackered! I struggled back into town, had an early dinner and then dragged myself uphill to the hostel. It was a quiet night of packing and reading, because the next day I was leaving Taranaki.

On Sunday I caught a bus to The Big Apple, literally a big apple-shaped cafe on the main road north. But what a tortuous journey! We stopped for lunch an hour after leaving New Plymouth, and I took the opportunity to taste NZ whitebait, which are much smaller fish than what we call whitebait in the UK and are served as a fritter with lots of batter. I wasn't that impressed, but it could have been the fault of the roadside cafe rather than the fish. Anyway, we left after half an hour, only to be flagged down by a woman on the road twenty minutes later who informed the driver that he had left a passenger behind! So we turned round, picked the teenager up (I have to say I think the driver should have counted passengers back on, but he didn't see it that way, blaming the kid), and turned back.

This forty minute delay wasn't the end of it though. Oh no! Instead, just after the time I would normally have been at my destination, the bus lost all its cooling water in a big leak. We stopped at the side of the road and faffed about for half an hour while the driver tried to work out a) how to open the cooling water system and b) where to get water from. I ended up at The Big Apple about an hour & a half later than I had planned. But luckily it was still light; given that I had a stretch to hitch-hike to get to Waitomo I didn't want it to be dark.

This was my first ever hitch-hike as a passenger (once I picked a hitch-hiker up in the middle of a snowstorm in Yorkshire) so I was a little nervous, but I needn't have been. Kiwis are all so friendly, I only had to wait about 90 seconds and the second car to pass me stopped and took me in. They dropped me at a hostel in Waitomo and that was that! The hostel was nice, and felt like a big Alpine chalet with a huge living room area and a wood-burning stove to heat it. I was in a room with a German guy - my first German of this NZ visit! - and we chatted for a few hours before turning in.

Monday was a day of adventure: I went black water rafting! This is just a cool-sounding name for an underground tubing trip, but it richly deserved a cool name because it was a very cool trip. Yes, tubing is good fun. You sit in an inner tube from a car tyre (well, in my case it was the tyre from an articulated lorry, or maybe one of those big construction site vehicles - you have to be able to squeeze your arse cheeks into it comfortably) and then basically let the river do the work. Only in this case you're underground, with a little torch on your head and pointy rocks all around you. Cool!

We got given wetsuits and boots, then picked an inner tube to fit our posteriors before being driven to the entrance to a cave with a river in it. From there we did a combination of underground walking and river tubing. The water was less freezing than I had feared, although some others in the group less blessed with subcutaneous protection than myself were feeling the cold a bit.

The best thing about it was undoubtedly the "leap of faith" where we had to jump backwards off an underground waterfall into a pitch black grotto, landing with a jolly splash and floating on through a long cavern, the roof of which was studded with the eerie luminescence of glowworms. It was easy to see how the insects that are the prey to the glowworms are duped into thinking they are flying into a night sky, when in fact they are flying towards the sticky traps of arachnocarpa luminosa: they hang fluorescent green globules of drool down into the cave from the roof on silken threads to attract their dinner. And they have to make sure they get plenty to eat at this larval stage, because the adult insect (the delightfully named fungus gnat) doesn't have mouth parts or a digestive tract, just naughty bits & wings!

After the three-hour trip we were treated to some delicious soup & bagels to help us warm up again. As the showers had been a little on the tepid side & the weather was taking a turn for the worse, this was a good thing. The afternoon proved to be very wet & windy. Good job the hostel was toasty hot! I was going to finish my book (a German translation of a Swedish police thriller) but I got sucked in to watching the first Lord of the Rings movie on video. I hadn't seen it since Los Angeles in Dec 2001, and it was good to see again.

On Tuesday I walked into Waitomo village to visit the cave museum, which I'm glad I didn't have to pay to get in - the visit was included in the price of the tubing trip - because it was (and I quote Betty Boo) really quite nice, but not that nice. Then I took a shuttle bus to Otorohanga and visited a great kiwi house & aviary. I ran into a German family and walked around with them. The kiwis were fantastic! There were four of them, two of whom were due to be fed just as I arrived. I didn't realise they could run so fast or jump so high! Really cute.

From Waitomo I took a bus to Hamilton, which I thought was going to be a bit dreary - its only real claim to fame is that it's NZ's largest inland city - but which in fact is kicking, with loads of trendy bars and tempting restaurants. One night in the YHA hostel there, and then after a bit of culture in the regional museum (including a shocking exhibition dealing with the blatantly racist way Chinese immigration was discouraged over a sixty-year period until the 1940s - the highlight being the newspaper headline "Silly Salacious Sluts Snared by Smirking Slit-Eyed Sneaks") I got the bus up to Auckland...