Around 75% of the entire population of New Zealand lives in Auckland. Which is strange, as the city seems so unlike the rest of the country. The pace, for one, is about twice as fast as anywhere else in New Zealand, and it also seems that restaurants stay open after 8pm!

We stayed at a beach-side campsite in Takapuna, a suburb on the North Shore, from which we commuted into the city on the Devonport Ferry. Auckland has been called 'Sydney with training wheels' and you can easily understand why. Approaching the city on the ferry is a very similar experience to that of Sydney's Manly ferry, but despite Auckland's skyscrapers and the fairground appeal of the Sky Tower, the skyline is noticeably more downscale than its Aussie cousin. You could describe this as typical Kiwi understatement vs. brash Aussie showmanship, but to be honest I think we both missed the wow factor of Sydney's Opera-House / Harbour Bridge combo.

Our first day in town we took a walking tour of the city, from the ferry terminal in the CBD up through trendy Chancery District into Albert Park, which sits on a hill that would have looked out over the city had the skyscrapers not got in the way. We dropped by a redux version of the Auckland Art Museum (the main museum is currently being refurbed) and saw an interesting exhibition of 18th century Maori portraits by two famous artists of their day: Charles Goldie & Gottfried Lindauer. As misguided public opinion of the day was that the Maori were a 'dying race' the pictures tended to have a melancholy air very similar to the old portraits you see of Native Americans.

There are lots of building works in Auckland as the city prepares itself for next year's Rugby World Cup. As a part of this facelift the next stop on our tour, the civic centre, was fenced off and crawling with hard working hard hats. We circumvented the site and then trekked south up the hill through Myers Park to uber-trendy the St Kevin's Arcade, full of boutique fashion brands, vintage clothing and comic book stores. Flagging after the accumulated exertions of 3 weeks on the road, we then very gratefully retreated to an Odeon cinema to watch Scott Pilgrim vs. The World – Our last English cinema experience for who knows how long?

It was fun to be back in a city again, especially on a Friday afternoon with its boozy lunches and pre-weekend buzz, but at the same time our impression of Auckland was that some of the things we liked best about New Zealand – the laid-back pace, the always-friendly people, their lack of pretence and sense of humour – were somehow missing, ditched in the race to become a modern global city. Maybe I'm just more of a Southern Man...



The following day we woke up early to catch the ferry out to Rangitoto volcano. What a great name! Rangitoto is Maori for 'Bloody Sky', a description its last eruption 'only' 600 years ago. Whatever it means, it's definitely fun to chant in a tribal fashion a la Joe vs The Volcano. RAN-GI-TO-TO-RAN-GI-TO-TO. The whole of the Auckland region is pockmarked with active and dormant volcanoes, to which it owes its bumpy landscape. My GCSE geography allowed me to classify Rangitoto as a classic 'shield' volcano (thanks Mr McGrath) whose gentle sides were relatively easy to walk up. It started to rain as we got to the crater rim, but we still got a great view of the bay and the city in the distance.

We spent our final 24 hours in Auckland preparing for Phase 3 of our Grand Tour: South America. This involved washing all our clothes, eating one last meal of fish&chips, attempting to clean the van and conceal a dent I'd put in the rear bumper, and purchasing vast quantities of western medicine. We've been diligently listening to our Michel Thomas Introductory Spanish on the car stereo over the last 5 weeks, so here's hoping we'll be up to the challenges of a new language and a new continent!

...This was how Russell, the first European settlement in New Zealand was known in the 1800s. When Charles Darwin visited in 1835 he described its inhabitants as 'the refuse of society'. As a successful whaling & sealing town it was world renowned for its population of drunk sailors, escaped convicts and prostitutes. Disappointingly, when we visited it wasn't as nearly as much fun as billed.

It is in a nice spot though, and you can understand why those pesky outlanders dropped anchor here: Dead centre in an enormous protected bay dotted with a hundred little islands, lots of trees to cut down and mend ships, friendly/easily pacified natives, fresh water and easy hunting. Nowadays this haven is known as The Bay of Islands.

We were there to see dolphins. The calm waters are frequented by pods of common and bottle-nosed dolphins, whales and orcas. Having missed out on swimming with dolphins in Kaikora due to bad weather, we were hoping for a second chance. Unfortunately, we didn't see any bottle-nosed dolphins (who are happy to swim with people), but we were lucky enough to see a pod of about 100 common dolphins who were idly swimming around a mother and baby pair of Bryde's Whales. It was a fantastic sight. The dolphins looked almost lazy, slowly circling the boat, pfffing water from their blow-holes. The boat's captain told us that they would have just eaten, so were taking it easy to digest their food.

As well as dolphin-spotting our boat also made a stop at Urupukapuka Island, one of the biggest in the bay. We walked up to the top of the hill in the centre of the island to find stunning views of the rest of the bay, as well as the site of an old 'pa' – a walled Maori settlement. Reading about the European settlers and their exploits, it's easy to forget that the land they arrived in had already been inhabited for hundreds of years. This history is especially significant in The Bay of Islands area as the nearby town of Waitangi is where the British and Maori finally signed a treaty in 1840 that recognised Maori land ownership and gave them the same rights as British citizens in exchange for British sovereignty. (Aside: James Busby, the then British Resident who drafted the treaty was also the founder of viticulture in both New Zealand AND in Australia. Legend). The site of the treaty-signing in the seaside garden of the former British Residency, has life-sized replicas of the 20 foot war canoes that the Maori arrived in. How's that for an entrance?

Driving into the outskirts of town we were greeted by the sight of steam rising into the darkening sky, seeping out from the earth itself. Scary stuff. We knew that there were geysers and hot springs and fueroles (where steam rises straight out of holes in the ground) in Rotorua, but we hadn't quite imagined just how many there were or how widespread they are. They're all over the place! The whole town is built on angry land. We drove through neigbourhoods where every house has a 6 foot pipe stuck into their front yard with billowing smoke coming out of it, and on our last night in town a bus driver pointed out where they had had a 'mini-eruption' 2 years ago by the side of the road in a small park. Surely it can't be sensible to hang around here?!

For some reason, instead of doing the obvious thing and getting as far away as possible, early Maori tribes saw the smoke, explosive water and bubbling mud and decided that this would be a nice place to settle down in, making Rotorua the spiritual centre of their culture. With this rich history to draw upon and ever increasing numbers of tourists to satisfy, Rotorua has become something of a 'Maori Disneyland'.

The worst of this was our trip to a 'Maori Cultural Performance'. I suppose we should have guessed from the name what it would be like. Started by an enterprising couple of guys called the Tamaki Brothers (who are apparently pretty gangsta according to the locals) in the 80s, the company drives tourists out to a reconstructed 'traditional Maori village' where Maori actors demonstrate the Haka and some other traditional rituals and entertainments before piling everyone into a large dining hall for a Hangi (earth oven cooked) buffet dinner. It felt like Butlins, and not in a good way. Sarah and I were less impressed by the performances than by the business. It cost around 100 NZD each, and in summer they can cater for up to 700 people a night, 7 days a week! Well done the Tamaki boys.

We breathed a sigh of relief when we boarded the bus home, only to discover that worse was yet to come. Our 'hilarious' bus driver forced all passengers to sing, by nationality, on the ride home (Sarah and I belted out a passable Welsh National Anthem having not been able to come up with a 'typical English song' Aside: What would you say is a typical English song? Aside from that dirge of a National Anthem? Answers on a postcard...) and when someone refused – a pair of petrified young Japanese women – the bus was driven around and around a roundabout, six times, until someone helped them out. Oh what fun we had...

Our best Maori experience was a visit to the hot springs to see the geysers Pohutu and The Prince of Wales' Feathers (thus named when the man himself visited and claimed that water spraying from the geyser looked like his heraldic badge). As well as telling us a bit about the history of the hot springs, our guide Mel was a font of information about the early Maori settlers – from how they made warm clothes from plants (as there were no cattle or sheep in New Zealand when they arrived), to the symbolic significance of the various buildings in a traditional settlement. I was interested to find out that for the first few hundred years after they arrived from Polynesia the Maori were a very peaceful people. That was until they had hunted all the easy prey to extinction and had to start fighting for land to farm.

Rotorua has been a tourist mecca for over a hundred years. The biggest leftover from the Grand Tours of our predecessors is the Victorian Bath House, where well-off foreigners used to come to 'take the waters'. By all accounts the Baths were awful, even by Victorian standards. Not only is the water so corrosive that the place had to be shutdown one week after opening to clean all the pipes – the first of many maintenance issues – but the treatments they devised were absolutely horrific. Our fave was the 'electrified bath' which involved the strategic application of direct currents to people's baths. Apparently good for treating those with a nervous disposition.

Nowadays the building serves as the town's museum. As well as seeing some of the original bathing equipment, we also saw a great exhibition about the All-Maori B Battalion's exploits during WW2, as well as an awesome video about the volcanic eruption of 1918 which featured a young Bret from Flight of the Conchords as a British tourist who gets killed when his house collapses.