According to Maori tradition the North Island of New Zealand was a fish, caught by the demi-god Maui. The Canoe from which he caught this fish became the South Island, with Stwart Island as its anchor stone. This story sets the North Isalnd atmosphere perfectly, because the hauling up of a fish such prodigious size suggests of Homeric spectacle - and the North Island is spectcular. It also suggests mystery, because how a people who knew no maps managed to perceive the fish-like shape of an island some 1000km (620 miles) long is a mystery, thew answer to which is buried deep into Maori lore.
    The tale goes on to tell of how Maui's brothers, half crazed with hunger, leaped onto the monstrous fish and began to devour it raw, so that it is gouged and scarred, and its backbone is exposed; and the picture thus conjured up is indeed a fair enough depiction of the North Island's highlands.
    Visitors to New Zealand, coming first to the North Island, sometimes express surprise at the fact that they see no high alps and no mightly glaciers, though such features often fill New Zealand's commercial travel literature almost to the exclusion of all else. Yet few such comments reveals any sense of disappointment. On the contrary, the exstatic visitor usually finds fresh evidence each day that what the North Island lacks in scene grandeur, it makes up for in sheer spectacle. For this is a land in which the creative forces of nature are still awesomely at work. The same applies in the South Island; but where the Southern Alps have been pushed up gradully, over aeons of time, by the infinitely ponderous movement of the plates of the earth's fractured crust, the highest mountains of the North Island have often leaped into being, or have suddently disappeared, sometimes within remembered history, as the result or aftermath of violent explosions.
   The same is true of many of the lakes and rivers. Where the South Island's alpine lakes have formed slowly in valleys carved by ice-age glaciers, many North Island lakes began as massive subsidences due to earthquakes or subterranean upheavals.