So it's not quite the same writing from our flat in Crystal Palace, with the trains, number 410 buses and chip-munching school kids interrupting me with their noises, but I didn't get a chance to talk about Vanuatu in Vanuatu or describe California during our flying visit to the US, so here goes.

We left Auckland on a sunny morning in early August - the first for days after storms battered the region, and flew to Fiji where we spent a night. At Mama's Pizza in Nadi, a less-than-beautiful town not far from the airport, we managed to order a pizza large enough to feed a family (there was indeed a family of five eating a pizza the same size at the next table), it was half a metre across. We slept intermittently, our stomachs trying to digest half a kilo of dough and cheese, while a couple of nearby nightclubs competed for our attention. It was another early flight to Port Vila, Vanuatu's diminutive capital (population 45,000). And it was pizza for breakfast, too.

Chris lived in Port Vila when he was little (3 to 4-years-old) and has fond memories, so we spent a day pottering around with him feeling an enormous dose of deja-vu, before getting up the next morning for an even earlier flight up to Luganville on Espiritu Santo, an hour north of Efate, where Fred and Lucy where waiting for us.

Vanuatu is really like nowhere else I've been. While other places have an antipodean-ness or an Asian or a European feel, these tiny, colourful islands in the pacific and their equally colourful occupants defy such easy classification. Ni-Vans - the people of Vanuatu - are friendly, laid back, extremely polite and patient. Along with one of the many native languages, they also speak either French or English, rarely both because schools teach in one or the other, a long-standing division - Vanuatu was the only jointly British-French run colony. It shows. Cafes serve croque monsieur and cafe au lait, and steak (excellent steak I should add - cheap and delicieux) is on the menu at restaurants. And they drive on the right. But then you can also get fish and chips, and people are polite in a very British way. They say please and thank you very much (tank yu toomas) and good morning and good day. The pidgin has a peculiar but heart-warming mix of the two - I know is 'me savvy'.

Luganville is Vanuatu's second largest town (there being no cities to speak of) - population 12,000. It's really just a big long road with houses and shops either side and a few dive centres dotted around the place. The island was the US military's second biggest base outside the mainland States during the Second World War and relics of their hardware litter the beaches and shallows, and so it is popular with divers. Most notable, and noticeable, among the relics - it is 200 metres long - is the SS Coolidge, a 1930s luxury liner turned military transporter that hit a friendly mine as it approached the relative safety of Luganville harbour by the wrong route in 1942 and subsequently sank metres off the beach.

We knew the Coolidge was big, but when its vast hulking mass appears out of the relative gloom of 20m+ under the sea, it looks huge. We dived around it and in it and saw its stern, its ornately tiled swimming pool and its enormous rudder and we kissed the Lady (see Chris's photos - to come!), diving deeper than we'd ever been before.

Its barnacled metal hulk proved an oddly alluring muse after so much time spent looking at colourful fish and corals. And oddest of all was the night dive, less a night dive and more a terrifying (I speak for myself, at least) but beautiful performance by ship and fish. Large schools of flashlight fish hide in the depths of the boat by day and then emerge as night falls, flashing little lights from just behind their eyes as they do. You don't see fish in the darkness, just a dizzying swirl of lights as you grip a rafter of some sort in the near-blackness of what was recently dusk. Jim, our Australian dive guide ("it's all good"), was just fantastic, but still nothing can escape the fact that we descended into blackness, Fred, Lucy Chris and I following him and his lone torch ('too much light puts the flashlight fish off') down into the seemingly darker gloom of one of the cargo holds, where we clung and hung and watched, mesmerised, hearing nothing but the sound of our own breathing. It was one of the most extraordinary things I've ever done.

After a few days of diving, we headed up along a rutted road (Santo's only paved road is in Luganville, and that only happened recently to herald the arrival of direct international flights from Brisbane) up to beautiful Lonnoc Bay and nearby Champagne Beach, where we said our goodbyes to Fred and Lucy in suitably idyllic surroundings. We had had such a fantastic time, had done so many wonderful things as a group and spent so much time in each other's company that it was a bit of a shock to be saying goodbye. They headed back to Luganville, for flights on to Efate and then Sydney, where I hope more good times await.

Chris and I spent another few days up at Lonnoc Bay. An hour and a half from Luganville, this little collection of huts by the beach is remote and beautiful. There's not much to do and that's the point. We tested all the meals of the menu at least once (Steak, chicken curry, omelette) and lazed around but mostly moped about the loss of our companions.

So we headed back to Luganville for some more diving (more close encounters with the Coolidge) and a trip to Millennium Caves. This wasn't quite the leisurely day trip I'd anticipated, rather a strenuous scramble up rock and down rope, followed by a 20-minute clamber in icy thigh high water along a river in a cave (there were bats and I swear I saw a rat) before a fun-but-chilly float through mini-canyons on kiddies rubber rings then a gruelling half hour hike back to the village. It was beautiful, but a spelunker am I not.

And then back to Vila. We explored properly this time. We found Chris's old house was empty and had a broken gate so snuck in and snooped around a bit. We hired a jeep and drove around the island - again mostly unpaved roads - and snorkelled at a sunken US Corsair fighter plane that ran out of fuel just short of land. We did a couple of dives off Moso, an island on Efate's northwest side, and we ate lots more steak. And - at last - we got to see some Olympics, as the rustic but homely Tree Tops Lodge came with satellite Aussie TV. Of course, this meant we never actually saw a whole event, only the Aussie competitors, and we often weren't even told who the winner was, only where the Aussies came, but it was better than nothing.

And then it was time to go. Leaving tiny Vanuatu and its easy-going islanders behind for the bustle of, well, anywhere, must be a bit of a shock at the best of times, but surely none so great as flying from Port Vila to LA.

We'd hired a car: it was huge. I could just about see the rear windscreen let alone out of it. The highways are huge: sometimes six lanes of traffic. And LA is huge, you seem to have to drive for hours just to get anywhere. From the raised highways it mostly looked like a vast - and hot - croydon, a roasting, bloated Purley Way. The food was huge too - we learnt early on the dangers of an all-you-can-eat buffet. It's just not right to eat mashed potato, ribs, fajitas, pizza and an assortment of pies all in one go.

Of course Hollywood itself is nice, all hills and precariously balanced uber-modern mansions, as you'd expect. Then we skirted through Bel Air (less modern, more Greco-column) and got lost heading west on Mullholand Drive (is it just me or does it just suddenly end, despite what the map says?). In fact, we got lost a lot - maps and road signs in California just aren't up to those lofty NZ standards and we kept missing things because they'd only be signposted seconds before the turn-of and you were inevitably in the wrong lane.

We decided to ditch the utterly useless Lonely Planet to Southern California (and while I'm Lonely Planet bashing, how many arguments must their useless maps cause?), and headed up the coastal highway through Malibu (no sign of Brangelina) and on to the small but lovely little town of Ventura. Then we headed inland through wooded hills and up into higher, dryer and forbidding desert, then down through oil fields and on to Bakersfield. Then we headed north east, skirting through the southern stretch of the Sequoia National Park and up to Kernville, a town founded on gold mining and pure cowboy country. Dozens of westerns were filmed there and a handful of other films too.

Then we headed on east in our beast of a car to Ridgecrest, in the middle of another desert. Its claim to fame is that it's home to the US Navy's Weapons Testing Centre. And then up early and down into Death Valley, which was, indeed, very very hot. Bleak and beautiful but relentlessly hot.

Drive a couple of hours south east of Death Valley and Vegas looms out of the desert, a glittering mass of metal in the cloudless sky. Get closer and you can make out an Eiffel Tower here, medieval turrets and and a New York skyline there (that one was ours). We gambled and we lost (I am not apparently a good gambling partner) and we packed our bags one last time and headed home.

Really it's been amazing. More funny moments than I can remember. The time Fred's mispronunciation took us half an hour the wrong side of Delhi, the four of us squeezed into a tiny auto-rickshaw, freezing. The names we've been called - me Sharon and Harlot, among others, while Chris was simply 'Christ' on the receipts we were dutifully issued each day at Unity Park Motel in Luganville. There was the Ayurvedic massage in Cochin. It still makes me blush just thinking about it.

And then there are the things I can't forget. The sight of children cleaning their teeth in the oil-black, filthy waters of the canals in Banjarmasin, often a few feet from their family's toilet - just a hut with a hole. The poverty on the streets of Jaipur. The slaughter at the funeral in Tana Toraja; Lucy and I hiding with the old ladies when a buffalo went on the rampage. Snorkelling with turtles and majestic manta rays in Derawan is one of the most amazing things I have ever done. And then there was the diving, and the people, at Daniel's Homestay in Bunaken. More recently, New Zealand's vast and naked beauty, and the pain a few feeble hours of snowboarding can cause. As they say on the slopes of South Island, sweet as.