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The State Highway takes you through the country’s most active geothermal region. Winding down the car window in lets in a whiff normally associated with rotten eggs. It is in fact the smell of sulphur emanating from the ground to the intense geothermal activity. The odour is so pungent in places that Rotorua has been nicknamed Sulphur City.

Once your nose acclimatises, your eyes can feast on steaming fumaroles, ‘blopping’ mud pools, and if you are lucky you might catch a gushing geyser (although one suspects there may be a human hand involved in inducing several of the geysers so as not to disappoint the passing visitor).

A number of areas are designated ‘Thermal Parks’ where you can tread the board walks across colourful steaming silica terraces stained yellow and orange by minerals, and stare in awe at vast azure steaming lakes. Perhaps the most famous of all is the scalding Champagne Pool in , which I visited a couple of years ago. Staring across the vista it is scarcely believable that it is 62 metres deep, with a surface temperature of around 75 degrees centigrade. It is a striking turquoise in colour, with traces of arsenic and antimony leaving bright orange deposits at the edge. All the while, steam billows up towards the sky. Breathtaking.

The noises are as much a part of the geothermal experience. If you tilt your ear close to a rock face, you can often hear water furious bubbling beneath the surface like a boiling kettle.

The activity is all due to the subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the Australian plate. Friction creates heat, which melts rock into magma. This molten rock either bursts to the surface in the form of volcanic activity or it remains within the Earth's crust, turning water beneath the earth’s surface into superheated steam.

Driving through the region takes me back to the many hours spent in the classroom and the university lecture hall, where it was a struggle to picture quite what a fumarole was or what was meant by a geyser. Physical geography means so much more when it is experienced first hand. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could go on a field trip to New Zealand!

Meanwhile the England team have settled into Napier, a town which challenges Miami for the title of . It was obliterated by an earthquake in 1931 and rebuilt within just a couple of years at a time when Art Deco was all the rage in Europe.

The team’s arrival a few days ago coincided with the town’s Art Deco Festival weekend. Vintage cars, big band music, and 20s and 30s regalia was everywhere. As I write, there is still an impressive vintage car parked outside our accommodation.

The town can have the strange effect of making you feel as if you are in a time warp, but England, trailing 2-1 in the series, will have to snap themselves back into the present on Wednesday if there is to be any future decider in Christchurch.