Mount Holdsworth is a couple of hours north of Wellington. It is not named after the late British jazz guitarist, Alan Holdsworth, though it is every bit as impenetrable. As you go north over the flat alluvial valley, the ridge to your left rises, part of the great fault-line that drives relentlessly across New Zealand from south west to northeast. It’s my first hike today, and I’m a little cautious. This walk isn’t in my books, but was recommended by T&T, who I met up north. It’s lush, it’s quiet, the sunlight trickles through the ferns and the spindly native trees, as it will everywhere over the weeks to come. The earth is like rock beneath my feet. It’s been a baking hot summer, with every day in the high twenties.

I’m walking by a stream, I hear birds singing, I see them clearly. They’re fearless, and many are flightless. With no predators in New Zealand, they’ve lost the inclination – and sometimes, the ability – to fly. They criss-cross my path, oblivious or simply trusting. The sun is dappling on the stream and as I rise, the air is a little cooler, the sound of the water a little more vague. .

I’m quite high and I reach a rope bridge. It’s frayed in places. Non TC would hate it. I’m not sure I’m that keen myself. The stream below is now a rushing tumbling torrent, and I imagine the lost chords snapping beneath me. I hear a train rumbling along somewhere close. I get across, and ten minutes later I realise I’ve misjudged how much water I’ll need. I turn back at the tree line. But still, I feel a beginner’s sense of achievement, like I’m riding a bike.

A week later, K tells me there were 300,000 tremors and earthquakes in New Zealand last year. Most of them are mild: plates sparring like youthful stags, just pretending, trying things out for size. Most tremors are deep below. He shows me a quake app on his phone. I play with it, I look at places I’ve been – like Mt Holdsworth last week. There had been no railway line there that day (or any other). Just a regular earthquake, 3.9 on the Richter Scale. Gulp. Even then, in Marlborough days later, I feel sick, and unsteady on my feet. Had the earth really moved for me?

Earthquakes here are just a fact of life. Like the weather in Britain it shapes the landscape and the conversation. A couple of weeks later I’m in Kaikoura spotting albatross and sperm whales. M & S-L tell me about the quake 18 months ago. You can see the effect before you get there – deep scars where sides of mountains have collapsed, where every road in and out was cut off for months. Where now, the public works are still in full flow, rebuilding, shoring up with gabions and in places, freight containers to defend against any sudden repercussions. That day in 2017, the seabed rose a full two metres and they drove like fury into the mountains to avoid any tsunami. Their business was ruined, but not their lives. Everyone helped each other out. M’s sons hired a helicopter from Christchurch to bring supplies in. They shared what they had – food, clothing, shelter. And of course the Australian insurance companies didn’t help, didn’t pay out, whereas the Kiwi ones did. They didn’t much like it when I said ‘community spirit’, as if that was way too glib for what they all lived through.

And Napier. An otherwise unremarkable town in Hawkes Bay, it suffered a devastating quake on February 2nd, 1931. The local museum has ‘survivor stories’. They talk about the still, hot, calm, late summer’s day in reverential, eerie tones. The cattle strangely refused to leave the fields for their sheds. It was the children’s first day back at school. Some would not go home. At 1.45, the town muttered and roared – and it rose and then crumbled. After the initial awe, the silence, the crying, the lack of birdsong.

But they didn’t hang around. Maybe we’re used now to ‘emergency responses’ and crack teams going in with tents, food, water, blankets. There and then, it was do what was needed. Establish a Committee, bring in medical help, trained and untrained. Establish a market in a field where goods could be brought and given, and later bought and sold. Get the British Navy in.

But the thing that sets Napier apart is what they built. They embraced the new, the spirit of the age. They developed an Art Deco town, using the very latest styles and techniques. They threw off their colonial edifices of brick and column that resembled Regency Bath. Low rise buildings went up in pastels of pink, blue and terracotta, set against sleek white walls, with modern ironwork and shop fronts with Poirot style lettering and glass mosaics. A riot of Spanish Mission, 30s modernism and sea liner chic. Everywhere you look up and wonder. And all this at the height of the Great Depression.

And of course, as coarser times took over, it fell into neglect. The shopfronts are now all chain stores, Vodafone vying with Spark for the loudest telecoms branding. Cheap perfume stores and cheaper clothing shops sit uneasily below the pediments and skyline of ziggurats and Egyptiania. I was shown round by the Art Deco Trust, who are winning a slow battle to preserve and celebrate these buildings, partly to get the tourist dollars in, but mostly because they are beautiful. Napier is a strange gem, full of both sadness and hope.

The last two weeks or so have been hiking weeks. Firstly in Marlborough Sounds, along the demanding Queen Charlotte track, getting different vantage points across the archipelago. Also, like S, I’ve become a postie, delivering the mail there on a boat trip to houses only accessible by water, dogs wagging tails on the jetties as we approached with parcels wrapped in brown paper.

But my heart has been won by the impossible beauty of the Abel Tasman track on the northern coast of South Island. Endless golden bays, azure seas, and coastal bush connecting it all together. Take your walking stick, or your water taxi, or your kayak, do the whole thing or, as I did, make it a two centre trek and cut the walk up. Stay in the fabulous Abel Tasman Lodge, owned by S&J, who gave up advertising partnerships in London to bring up their baby back home. Stay also in the luxurious Awaroa Lodge, like most places inaccessible by road, where the wine list itself is celebration of another 15 mile day. This was the toughest place to leave, ever, anywhere. I felt so alive listening to the waves, swimming at unannounced bays on a whim (yeah, me!), pounding up the bush, hell I even climbed some actual rocks. If my mother could see me now…

Inevitably, I’m feeling it, and I’ve stopped in Nelson for a couple of nights. It’s ‘New Zealand’s most liveable city’. City is pushing it. It’s all low rise wooden houses with verandas, mostly built about 1890. It has coffee shops, heavy bread, a pretentious set of galleries, one truly great restaurant, and actually good 60s music wafting away (mostly hippy stuff like Jefferson Airplane, Love and my faves, It’s a Beautiful Day). It’s as safe as houses. But it’s as dull as ditchwater. My guidebook says a highlight is the walk round the airport.

So this is the moment in the blog where I miraculously link the close to the start. I’m writing postcards, I’m washing my clothes, I’m getting ready for the great haul down the remote west coast, my route carefully choreographed to reach some amazing places over my last two weeks here, before Sydney – and meeting up there with G&A, and N&D. I’m wondering how to close this off.

Then I get a message from P at the next BnB, 150 miles away. She’s been arranging a couple of things for me. It says simply ‘Hi Larry, I’m afraid the 6, the only road between us and you has had a massive land slip. 400 metres of road have been taken out overnight, and the rubble is several metres deep. We’re inaccessible to you at the moment. It might take a week to clear it. Call me! Incidentally, my first baby is due in two days’ time’.

The earth moves for us, and against us, all the time…