Aotearoa

Land in Auckland, where two harbours squeeze the city to an isthmus and half the households seem to own a boat. Meet your expedition leader and crew this evening for the welcome briefing, then a first taste of the country's food-and-craft-beer renaissance on the Viaduct or up Karangahape Road. Early arrivals can climb a volcano before dinner — Mount Eden's crater rim is twenty minutes from downtown, which is a very New Zealand sentence.

East to the Coromandel Peninsula, where pōhutukawa trees leans over green coves. The afternoon earns the postcard: the walk (or optional kayak) to Cathedral Cove, a marble-white sea arch cut clean through a headland. Then the peninsula's best trick — Hot Water Beach, where you dig your own spa pool in the sand as the tide drops, thermal water rising through your toes while the Pacific rolls in cold two metres away. Night in Hahei, salt in hair, sand in everything.

South through farm country that smells increasingly of sulphur — Rotorua announces itself by nose. The afternoon walks a full geothermal park: geysers running on their own schedule, mud pools blooping like slow porridge, silica terraces, and the Champagne Pool ringed in fluorescent orange. Steam drifts across suburban streets and municipal parks here; the whole town lives on a thin lid over the planet's engine room. Evening free for the Polynesian-style lakeside spa or the mountain-bike forest.

A gentler Rotorua day: the Redwoods of Whakarewarewa on foot or treetop walkway, the green and blue lakes, and optional add-ons for the adrenaline-inclined (zorbing was invented here, and the town has never calmed down since). The evening is the North Island's cultural centrepiece — a pōwhiri welcome onto a marae, haka and song, and a hāngī feast steamed underground in the traditional way, eaten long and happily. You will hum the harmonies for days.

A short hop to Taupo via the Huka Falls, where the Waikato River — New Zealand's mightiest — is squeezed through a slot and comes out the other side the colour of glacier mints. The lake beyond is the caldera of one of Earth's great supervolcanoes, now behaving itself beautifully under trout and sailboats. The afternoon is for lake swimming, the Māori rock carvings by kayak, or nothing at all; the evening is for early bed, because tomorrow the mountain calls at dawn.

The day the whole trip bends around. Nineteen kilometres over the saddle of a live volcanic massif: up the Devil's Staircase, across the lunar South Crater, along the rim of the Red Crater's rust-and-black gash, then down past the Emerald Lakes — three impossible turquoise eyes in the volcanic grit — with Ngāuruhoe's perfect cone (Mount Doom, to a certain generation) standing over everything. Guided, weather-checked, transfers handled, legs jelly, grin permanent. Gentler lake-country alternatives run for anyone sitting the mountain out.

Down the island to Wellington, the little capital folded into hills around a harbour, with more cafés, craft bars and film-industry wizardry per head than anywhere in the hemisphere. The afternoon is yours for Te Papa — the national museum, and one of the world's best — the cable car, Cuba Street's happy weirdness, or the Weta Workshop tour. Dinner and a last North Island pint somewhere snug; the ferry sails in the morning.

Sail the Cook Strait on one of the world's great ferry crossings: open water giving way to the Marlborough Sounds, where the ship threads drowned valleys with bush to the waterline for the last hour into Picton. Then west through Havelock (green-lipped mussels, if you're brave at lunch) and the hop country of Nelson to Marahau, the gateway village of Abel Tasman National Park. The sea outside your lodge is tomorrow's highway.

A full day in the golden park. Morning by sea kayak along granite headlands and honey-coloured beaches — fur seals on the islets, rays under the hulls, tea on a beach with no footprints — then boots on for a stretch of the coastal track, all mossy switchbacks and lookouts over water that refuses to be photographed accurately. A water taxi skims you home along the whole glorious coastline. This is the South Island's gentlest perfect day, deliberately placed before its wildest ones.

The wild side. Down the West Coast — a 600-kilometre strip of rainforest, surf and stubborn little towns — pausing at Punakaiki, where the Pancake Rocks stack the shoreline like burnt crêpes and blowholes detonate with the swell. The Tasman Sea keeps you company on the right, the Southern Alps rise on the left, and by evening you are in Franz Josef village with a glacier hanging in the valley above the pub.

Morning with the glacier: the valley walk to the viewing point, where Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere — the tears of the avalanche girl, as Māori tradition names the ice — pours off the Alps into rainforest. Upgrades available for the heli-hike (crampons, blue caves, and the best money you'll spend all trip) or a scenic flight over the névé. The afternoon soaks it off in the glacier hot pools, rain forest overhead, sandflies plotting outside. Final night on the wild coast.

One last mountain flourish: over Arthur's Pass, the high road through the Southern Alps, kea (the world's only alpine parrot, and its most criminal) inspecting the car park, waterfalls stitching the walls. Down onto the Canterbury Plains and into Christchurch by mid-afternoon for onward flights — or, far better, for our South Island expedition, which begins where this one ends and goes deeper: Milford Sound, Aoraki/Mount Cook and the deep south await.