The small town of Whakatane is nondescript: dreary. The two major supermarkets, Countdown and New World, vie for your weekly shop. Brash functional stores line the road in, selling farm machinery, cars, boat equipment. MacDonalds, Burger King and KFC all in a row, a furniture store, a stationery shop and lots of empty lots with chain link fencing.

In town the regional council offices and a dilapidated civic monument dominate one street. The other has everything you’d expect of a small provincial settlement – hair and nail shops, cheap clothing stores, a cinema, pots and pans. An Indian restaurant, an Irish pub, a Thai takeaway. The adventure trip stores are closed or boarded up.

It’s all very quiet. But a few weeks ago it was the focus of the world’s press. For it’s the point of departure for a day trip to White Island, the volcano that erupted, and where 20 people died. I was booked to go, and after the tragedy I decided to come to Whakatane anyway.

I stay in a motel owned by the family that takes people to White Island. But of course you can’t visit now – or perhaps ever again. Out in the Bay of Plenty, it surprises me – still erupting, a heavy plume of thick white-grey smoke billowing upwards.

There’s a different sort of cloud hovering over the town. You can feel it everywhere. The motel reception clerk tells me they’ve not had it that bad, but elsewhere it’s nothing but cancellation after cancellation. The bars and restaurants are all empty. The town feels numb.

In the morning I am the only person in the tourist office. A woman in a nicely pressed jacket and blouse smiles and offers me a scenic flight over White Island. I just look at her, not knowing how to respond, what to say. She looks back at me, her eyes go down. We start what passes for conversation and then suddenly she says ‘I know your look…. but we have people with businesses here.’ So I do book a day out on the ocean to swim with dolphins and seals. I go out with Jim, and a half load of German and Scottish tourists. Katrina from Düsseldorf is particularly annoying, as she waddles in front of everyone with her camera and shouts at the top of her voice ‘Look, we are so near now to White Island! Jim, won’t you take us closer?’ Then ‘How many people died Jim? Was it 30?’ Later she will collar me and tell me she is taking a two month sabbatical from work to get some peace and quiet. All I can imagine is that her colleagues clubbed together…

Jim is middle aged, large, muscular. He’s had this business for seventeen years. In the off season he cleans up the effluent outflow from the town. He tells me about Hayden, the local guide who took people to White Island, who went back to help people, who died doing so, and whose body was one of two never recovered. ‘He was the best bloke you could ever imagine. Always would tell me where the dolphins were if he was out before me. It was no surprise he went back, or that he died helping people out’.

Later I say I’d read that the government is compensating people. ‘Yeah, but we have to pay $30,000 each year on compliance. Health and safety of the passengers, training of my staff, keeping the boat right… that’s a lot of ticket sales. There used to be 27 boats working this area for tourists – we are down to six now. The Maori declared the sea a holy place to respect the dead, so obviously we couldn’t go out at all for several weeks.’ So we rattle around his boat, wonder at the beautiful dolphins who swim with us searching for fish near the underwater thermals, and we trail behind the boat on a rope in the sea to get up close. Then we go into a bay at nearby Whale Island where we swim with seals. All the while, a mile or two away, the plume rises endlessly above White Island. And we carry on regardless.

I’m glad I came. I am fully aware my motives are questionable – was I coming so I could write this blog post? To show I’m a great guy with a good line in empathy? To wallow in others’ sadness? I really hope No, No and No.

Simon and Garfunkel are on in the cafe as I write this. ’A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest…’. We take and take when we are traveling. We grab our piece of an experience someone’s told us about, or we’ve found in Lonely Planet. Sometimes we are really lucky and discover something special all by ourselves. Then we move on. When the ‘experience’ disappears, the reason has gone, why be here? Does a place still exist if no one visits? I just wanted to acknowledge something by coming. Exactly what, I’m still not entirely sure.