On the way south to Rotorua you stop at Waitomo and drift through the caves under a ceiling of glow-worms. Thousands of pinpricks of cold light reflected in the black water. Then Rotorua itself, steaming with sulphur, the geothermal heart of the North Island. The contrast in a single day is the country in miniature.

Queenstown sits on a fjord-like lake under the Remarkables, and it's the South Island's hub for everything fast. Jet boats, gondolas, the bungy that started it all on the Kawarau bridge. But the quiet pleasure is the lake itself at dawn, flat and cold, the peaks doubled in it. A good base for a couple of nights either way.

Franz Josef is one of the few glaciers on earth that flows down through temperate rainforest almost to sea level. You walk in through dripping bush and there is the wall of blue ice. The heli-hike lands you on top of it; the valley walk gets you to its foot. The West Coast weather is wild and the sandflies are merciless, both worth enduring.

Christchurch is still rebuilding from the 2011 earthquake, and that's the interesting thing about it now. The Cardboard Cathedral, the street art, the gap-filler gardens where buildings used to be, a city remaking itself in the open. The vintage tram loops the centre. It's the calm end of the trip after the glaciers and the lakes.