The caves can be explored by punt or by donning a wet-suit and heading underground with an inflated car tyre. This unique New Zealand activity is called ‘cave rafting’ and provides an opportunity to float through the caverns staring at unusual rock formations and ceilings packed with glow worms, that resemble a star-strewn night sky.

Wanganui, on the west coast of the North Island, lies near the mouth of the Whanganui River, New Zealand’s longest navigable waterway. Visitors can travel upriver by jetboat or paddle steamer and downriver by kayak or canoe. The UNESCO World Heritage Site Whanganui National Park is a green vision of unspoiled native bush where there remains the ‘Bridge to Nowhere’, a relic of the failed attempt at settlement in the glorious wilderness.

The Egmont National Park is also a UNESCO-listed World Heritage area, and provides an excellent though strenuous opportunity, even for the less adventurous, to climb a mountain (Taranaki) in a little over eight hours (return). Mount Taranaki, at the center of the national park, is an extinct volcano standing majestically amidst flat areas of lush green dairy farmland. The city of New Plymouth (population 50,000) is well known for its parks and gardens and, in particular, its colorful display of rhododendrons and azaleas in the spring.

Lake Taupo presents the less adventurous with an opportunity to enjoy unrivalled brown-trout fishing and a serene expanse of water fed by glacial streams and rivers. Rotorua is a good base for exploring the geysers and the large thermal zone of the North Island. It is a lively city full of all the usual tourist prerequisites and has the distinctive sulphurous smell of the surrounding boiling-mud pools.

Rotorua is also a major center for accessible Maori culture - there is an arts center where young Maori learn the skills of traditional bone, wood and greenstone carving. There is also the opportunity to visit a Marae (a Maori meeting house usually forbidden to pakeha, foreigners) and enjoy a concert of traditional songs, the haka (a Maori challenge usually witnessed before All Black rugby matches) and a hangi (a delicious feast cooked in an earth oven).