New Zealand

Begin your journey in Auckland, a harbour city of volcanic cones, islands and vineyards, opening straight out onto the Hauraki Gulf.

Spend your time being welcomed at dawn on Ōrākei Marae by a descendant of the chiefs who founded Tāmaki Makaurau, hearing the stories held in the land beneath the city, before taking to the water for a full day of sailing in the gulf. Between the two, the city’s dining is among the best in the country, with Waiheke and the west coast beaches close at hand.

Where you will stay:

Continue south to Taupo, where a lake the size of a small sea sits among volcanoes and the Waikato River runs fast and blue past your door.

Spend your time on a private heli hike into Tarawera Falls, where the water pours straight out of a cliff face, out on the quiet western bays of the lake by boat, and in the forest for a day built around food, fire and the land with Kai Waho. Between adventures, unwind at your own pace on the riverbank, in the spa, or over long dinners at the lodge.

Where you will stay:

Cross to the South Island and into the Canterbury high country, arriving by way of Kaikoura, where whales and crayfish are reached by helicopter along the coast.

Spend your time on a working high country station beneath the Southern Alps, with a morning farm tour, a chef’s table dinner at Sugarloaf and a private lunch cooked outdoors on the station itself. A half day with a Māori carver over on the West Coast at Hokitika adds a quieter and very different kind of afternoon.

Continue south through Southland to Manapouri, on the edge of Fiordland, where the mountains come down to the water and the weather writes its own itinerary.

Spend your time on a private scenic drive and cruise into Milford Sound, and in the air above Dusky and Doubtful Sounds, country that almost nobody reaches by road. Closer to the lodge there is a farm tour, and the particular quiet that comes with being this far south.

Finish in Queenstown, reached by way of the Mavora Lakes and Walter Peak, with Lake Wakatipu below and the Remarkables above.

Spend your time walking an early section of the Routeburn Track before anybody else arrives, tasting your way through Central Otago with a private guide, and giving over a morning to the spa. The final day is left entirely free, which by this point in the journey is usually welcome.

Haere mai ki Aotearoa. Welcome to the land of the long white cloud.

You are met at the end of the air bridge, guided through baggage claim and immigration with priority, and driven into the city to the Park Hyatt Auckland, on the water’s edge at Wynyard Quarter.

The rest of the day is yours. Auckland is a subtropical harbour city built across dormant volcanoes, with excellent dining, quiet beaches and vineyards all within easy reach, and after a long flight there is a great deal to be said for doing none of it and watching the boats instead.

You begin before sunrise at Ōrākei Marae with Dane Tumahai, a Ngāti Whātua kaumātua and a direct descendant of the chiefs who helped establish Tāmaki Makaurau. As ahi kā, the one who keeps the home fires burning, it falls to him to welcome manuhiri, and he takes you to the cultural sites of the city to share the history of his people and what these places mean to his iwi. He closes with karakia, a blessing for the journey ahead.

The rest of the day is spent on the water, with a private charter out into the Hauraki Gulf aboard the Marlin. Breakfast and lunch are served on board, and the islands, the volcanic cones and the city skyline pass by at whatever pace suits you.

You are collected from your hotel mid morning and driven south to Taupo, stopping for lunch along the way, arriving at Huka Lodge in the early afternoon.

Huka sits in seventeen acres of park like gardens on the bank of the emerald Waikato River. It began life more than a century ago as a fishing camp of canvas tents pitched along a trout rich stretch of water, and reopened in 2025 after a considered centenary redesign that lightened the rooms without touching the calm.

The afternoon is yours. There is tennis, croquet and swimming, bicycles for the river trails, and the Huka Spa in the wellness grounds, where a gathering of huts holds treatment rooms, a sauna, an ice shower and a hot pool among the trees. Or you can walk the riverbank path to Huka Falls, where more than two hundred thousand litres of water a second pour over an eleven metre drop, and loop back in time for a drink on the terrace.

Today you travel out to Tom’s whare in the Kaimanawa Ranges, along the highway, through one of the country’s largest high country stations and onto a remote track that leads into his ancestral land.

Tom is kaitiaki, guardian, of a five thousand acre block, and a natural storyteller who blends humour with a deep knowledge of the place. The day is built around kai and the traditional ways Māori lived from the land: how food was grown, gathered, preserved and prepared, and how closely all of it was tied to the seasons and the country around you. Lunch is part of the experience rather than an interruption to it.

Nothing about the day is staged or polished, which is precisely why it works. You are back at the lodge by early evening.

The helicopter lands on the lawn at Huka mid morning and lifts you away towards Mount Tarawera, the volcano whose eruption reshaped this part of the country in 1886.

You land on the summit, with the crater rift falling away below and views out across the lakes, before setting off on a seven kilometre return hike that follows the Tarawera River through the forest. The walk ends at Tarawera Falls, where the river disappears underground and then bursts straight out of a sheer rock face, a sight that is difficult to believe even while you are looking at it.

There is a picnic lunch, time for a swim if the day is warm, and then the helicopter again, with an afternoon return to the lodge.

A short transfer takes you to Kinloch Marina, where you meet Ian, your skipper for a private charter into the western bays of Lake Taupo, a stretch of coastline with no road access and very few other boats.

You go ashore at Kotukutuku Landing to walk a bush trail beside a stream that tumbles down a ravine into the lake, hearing the falls long before you see them. Back aboard, Ian noses the boat into a rocky nook where you can reach out and touch the water, then edges towards the base of Otupoto Falls, close enough to feel the spray.

The afternoon takes in the sandy beach at Waihaha Bay, a swim in the clear shallows of Te Papa Bay, a hidden ravine where the bush closes in overhead, and finally the Karangahape Cliffs, standing hundreds of feet above the lake and guarding this remote southern corner. You are back at the lodge by early afternoon.

You fly from Rotorua to Christchurch in the morning and go straight from the airport to the helicopter.

Your pilot is joined by Dr Krista van der Linde, a marine mammal biologist who runs her own study and conservation initiative, and you fly north over the Kaikōura ranges and one of the most dramatic coastlines in the country. Out over the Hikurangi Marine Reserve you look for the sperm whales that live close in to the Kaikōura shore, with Krista on hand to explain what you are seeing and answer whatever you want to ask.

Lunch is crayfish, collected from a café run by a family of local fishermen, and taken up into the mountains to eat somewhere quiet. Afterwards you fly over the site of the 2016 Kaikōura earthquake, with its landslides and its slow recovery still written into the landscape, before continuing inland to Flockhill Lodge in the Craigieburn Valley.

Flockhill is a working sheep station of thirty six thousand acres, close to Arthur’s Pass and ringed by mountains, rivers and lakes. This morning you join one of the shepherds to see how it actually runs: working with the farm dogs, moving stock, getting up close to the sheep, and spending time in the woolshed learning what wool has meant to this country.

Dinner is at the chef’s table at Sugarloaf, in a front row seat at the fire kitchen. There is no menu. You are brought the best of what the season is offering, guided by your own preferences, with a beverage pairing and one of the senior team hosting, and the stories behind each course come from the people who cooked it.

Today you choose how to get there. Walking, biking, by ATV or on horseback, you head out across the station to meet your chef somewhere in the middle of it.

Lunch is cooked over fire in a remote alpine setting, with beverage service, tussock, mountains and nobody else for a very long way in any direction. It is the kind of thing that sounds like a flourish and turns out to be the day everybody remembers.

The rest of the day is open. Flockhill offers hiking, biking, kayaking, paddleboarding, horse riding and advanced fly fishing, and the team will build something around whatever interests you.

You cross the alps to the West Coast this morning, to Hokitika, the heart of pounamu country, with a picnic hamper from the lodge for the journey.

Pounamu, New Zealand jade or greenstone, is taonga, treasure, and the soul stone of this country. It is harder than steel, patterned like nothing else, and carries deep cultural weight. You spend the afternoon with Bevan Climo, a master carver and a descendant of the last Paramount Chief in Hokitika, who shows you how the stone is worked, talks you through some of his own pieces and explains why this material matters as much as it does.

It is a long drive for a half day, and every traveller who does it says the same thing afterwards, which is that it was worth it.

You fly from Christchurch down to Invercargill, where you are met by Callum, who has guided in Fiordland, served in the police, worked as a professional hunter and built and sold a wild venison business, and knows this region as well as anybody alive.

Southland is well off the usual routes, largely agricultural, all rolling hills, vivid greens, wild empty beaches and warm, thickly accented locals. Callum takes the scenic roads north towards Fiordland, telling stories and stopping wherever it is worth stopping, which might mean driving the length of a deserted beach, walking somewhere with a pair of binoculars, or a detour to a local distillery.

You arrive at Cabot Lodge in time for cocktails and canapés. Cabot sits in the middle of Cathedral Peaks Station, takes a maximum of ten guests, and looks west over Lake Manapouri, known to pre European Māori as Moturau, many islands, and Roto Ua, rainy lake. It is entirely normal to sit here in sunshine watching rain drift across the mountains on the far shore.

The drive into Milford is often called the most scenic alpine road in the world, and today you take it slowly, with a private nature guide who stops where the coaches do not. There are short walks at Gertrude Valley, Lake Gunn and Marian Gantry alongside the better known Mirror Lakes and The Chasm, and a running commentary on the flora, the wildlife and the history that turns a beautiful drive into something you understand.

At Milford you join a premium lunch cruise out onto the water, beneath cliffs that rise straight out of the fiord.

Then comes the afternoon. A helicopter takes you south along the coast into Doubtful Sound, known in Māori as Patea, the sound of silence, detouring into a hanging valley called Campbell’s Kingdom that holds its own lake and waterfall. You land at Mount Pender in Dusky Sound, forty kilometres long and scattered with more than three hundred and fifty islands, reachable only by sea, by air, or by a five day walk over the mountains. The engine is shut down so you can stand in the quiet of it.

The return flight crosses the Main Divide of the Southern Alps with a second landing high at Mount Kidd, then passes over Lake Manapouri and sets you down at Cabot in time for canapés, looking out at the wilderness you have just been standing in.

Today is deliberately slow. The morning is free for the walking tracks, the library and the courtyard fire, and there is no expectation that you do anything at all.

In the afternoon there is an hour long tour of the station by four wheel drive, two thousand acres of sheep, deer and cattle country. You go up to the highest point on the property for the view, and down to the Waiau River, and learn how farming works here, what the land was before it was farmed, and how the national park next door shapes everything.

If you would rather do something else, the lodge can arrange beekeeping, an alpaca tour, a sheepdog demonstration or a massage instead.

This is a driving day in the best sense. You head north briefly before turning onto gravel back roads towards the Mavora Lakes, two beautiful lakes used as filming locations for Lord of the Rings and a favourite camping spot for local families, with a picnic lunch somewhere along the way.

From there the back roads continue to Walter Peak, a working sheep station on the far shore of Lake Wakatipu. Here, unavoidably, you meet the crowds this itinerary has spent a fortnight keeping you away from, and there is a reason they come: you cross the lake to Queenstown aboard the TSS Earnslaw, a coal fired steamer that has been working this water for more than a century.

You arrive in Queenstown in the early evening, a short walk from ROKI, on the edge of town with the lakefront and the restaurants close by. Essence, downstairs, is the more formal of its two dining rooms; The Terrace is the relaxed one with the view.

The morning is given over to the Breathe signature ritual at ROKI Pure: a long restorative massage using warm stones and slow rhythmic work, followed by a facial and a tension releasing massage of the jaw, temples and scalp. After two weeks of early starts and mountain air it lands rather well.

In the afternoon your guide collects you for a relaxed half day among the vineyards near Queenstown. Central Otago is the southernmost wine region in the world, set among big mountains, clear lakes and dramatic skies, and it is best known for Pinot Noir, though the Chardonnay, Riesling and Pinot Gris repay attention too. The industry here traces back to the Otago gold rush of the 1860s and now runs to well over a hundred wineries.

Dinner is left free, and town is a short walk away.

An early start, and deliberately so. Your guide collects you at seven, which puts you on the Routeburn Track well ahead of everybody else.

The track begins at the Routeburn Shelter and climbs through beech forest alongside the Routeburn River to the Routeburn Flats, one of the finest stretches of any of the Great Walks. If you have the legs for it, you can carry on and up to the Routeburn Falls Hut, a longer uphill section that ends beside the falls themselves.

Snacks and hot drinks come with you on the trail, and the day finishes with a platter lunch at Mrs Woolly’s in Glenorchy before the drive back along the lake. You are returned to the hotel in the late afternoon.

A free day, and by this point in the journey a welcome one.

You might do very little: some shopping, lunch on the wharf, a slow walk through the Queenstown Gardens or along the Frankton Arm Walkway beside the lake.

If you would rather keep moving, Queenstown Hill gives panoramic views for a moderate effort, the Tiki Trail climbs through the forest to Bob’s Peak, and Ben Lomond is a serious half day on the legs with the best view in the district at the top. The galleries in town are worth an hour either way.

You check out of ROKI after breakfast and are transferred to Queenstown Airport for your flight home, with the Remarkables on one side and the lake on the other for the last few minutes of it.

Seventeen nights, two islands, five lodges, and a great deal to talk about on the way back.