The youngest of these islands, Rangitoto, bubbled up from the ocean floor only 600 years ago. Even so, life has been quick to make inroads into its jagged basalt slopes. I spent half a day wandering around and tramping to the island's summit along rough tracks beaten from the solid rock. Parts of the island are jumbled fields of black lump scoria rock, desolate except for a light sprinkling of lichen and moss - the vanguard of the plant kingdom. Here and there, cracks filled with dead lichen allow small wind-blown seeds to germinate resulting in short, gnarled puhutukawa trees that send slow but unstoppable roots down into the fissures and cavities in the rock below. Each tree creates a small oasis of life: ferns and flax plants grow in the shade in the thin humus made from decaying puhutukawa leaves.

The tree-lined crater slopes gently down to the base 60 metres below. The only sound I could hear as I sat in the sunshine on the crater rim, other than the nearby finches arguing over the crusts of a few discarded sandwiches, was an indistinct and continuous rumble drifting across the water from the city. It was the overlap of a hundred thousand engines, radios, construction noises and human voices - a metropolis heartbeat. From this distance the Sky Tower really revealed its height - at 382 metres it stood well over a 100 metres higher than the volcano I was standing on. But then whatever the volcano's function in life was, the Sky Tower's purpose was simply to be tall.

It fulfils this goal admirably and, as I stood on its plate glass floor some time later, looking down at the microscopic world a thousand feet beneath my feet, I felt the same unreal sensation that I had before jumping off the Kawarau bridge. The people down there looked like ants, but conversely the ants up here didn't look like people. I was surprised to see them up here - had they hitched a lift or had they climbed all the way up here? Either way it was an impressive feat for ant-kind.

Examining the tower from afar makes you question the wisdom of building such a tall thin structure so near a faultline. Reassuring PR coos that it will withstand an earthquake of 7.0 on the Richter scale - provided that the epicentre is 20km away. This probably seems fine to a city that has made its home nestling amongst a bunch of dormant, but not inactive, volcanoes.

I managed to spend a lot of time in Auckland, more than I had expected. A lot of it was spent alternating between the excellent vegetarian café mentioned in the last entry, and a brand new Internet lounge run by a bunch of students who were simultaneously revising for their finals. In the brief intervening periods, I dithered over what to do about my flight to Fiji. Like a large number of backpackers heading eastwards, I decided that military curfews and rampant looting weren't high on my list of holiday adventure activities. (Many of the large posters displayed in a number of local shop windows advertising a 'fabulous 7 day holiday in Fiji' as the prize for some competition have recently acquired a small sticker which reads "* or another Pacific island"). Whilst dithering with aplomb, I managed to catch up with a friend of a friend who currently lives in Auckland. We spent a couple of days absorbing culture, eating kumara chips and chatting about home. Finally, by Tuesday, I had sorted out my life again, at least in the short term, and decided to head out of Auckland.

Northland's largest city is Whangarei (pronounced Fangaray), a sleepy sprawl that lies in the valley of the Hatea river. Once I'd managed to drag my ever-heavier rucksack up the cliff face to the hostel above, I spent some time exploring the town itself. I passed on the doll museum and the grammatically uncomfortable "Museum of Fishes" but I did spend some time at the clock museum. The rooms inside were filled with ticking and chiming. Pocketwatches, grandfather clocks, French baroque clocks with multicoloured marble, cuckoo clocks, 24 hr clocks, Japanese clocks, American clocks, kitsch clocks, kitchen clocks, alarm clocks, anticlockwise clocks, new clocks and very very old clocks. They had a poster of John Harrison, inventor of the first accurate sea-going clock, but they didn't have a Harrison - they did have a Dent though - by the man that constructed the clock face on St. Stephen's Tower in London (Big Ben to most of you). My favourite of the lot was a 1930s art deco clock that uses variations in atmospheric pressure to wind itself up!

Despite the slow pace of life here I'm aware that my time in New Zealand is running out - so today I'm off up further north still, to the tiny town of Paihia.