Eleven days from Sydney to the South Island: three hours across the Tasman and nothing is the same

Whatever time the flight lands, go to the water. Circular Quay is where the ferries, the trains and the city all meet, it is where the First Fleet landed in 1788, and everything on this first day is within twenty minutes of it on foot.

The Opera House was won in an open competition in 1957 by a Danish architect nobody had heard of, took sixteen years instead of four, cost fourteen times the estimate, and drove Jørn Utzon out of the country in 1966 after a change of government and a fight about money. He never came back and never saw it finished. Just over a million tiles cover the shells, in two shades that are only obvious close up.

Behind it, the Royal Botanic Garden runs around the next bay: thirty hectares founded in 1816, which makes it the oldest scientific institution in Australia, and free. Walk out to Mrs Macquarie's Point at the far end, where the bridge and the Opera House line up, and stay for the light.

Hyde Park Barracks is a plain brick building from 1819 designed by Francis Greenway, who was himself a convict transported for forgery and who then designed a good deal of early Sydney. Fifty thousand men and boys slept in its hammocks. It is now a World Heritage site and the audio-led route through it is one of the best museum experiences in the country, built almost entirely out of the objects that fell through the floorboards and were preserved by rats.

Across the park, the Australian Museum was founded in 1827 and is the oldest in the country. The Australian megafauna, the mineral hall and the First Nations galleries are the three worth your time, and general entry is free.

Finish at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, ten minutes east through the Domain. It is also free, and since 2022 it has had a second building next door, part of which is a decommissioned naval oil tank from the second world war, unlit and thirty metres square, now used for installations. Going down into it is the strangest twenty minutes in Sydney.

Taronga opened in 1916 on a headland facing the city, and the animals have a better view than most residents. Take the ferry from Circular Quay, twelve minutes, then the cable car from the wharf to the top gate and walk down through the zoo towards the water, which is the way it is designed to be done. The Australian section is the reason to come rather than the big cats.

Come out at the bottom and keep walking east along the shore. Bradleys Head is twenty minutes away through bush that is still full of lorikeets and the occasional water dragon, and on the point there is a stone fortification from the 1840s and the mast of the first HMAS Sydney, the cruiser that sank the German raider Emden in the Indian Ocean in 1914.

The track continues to Chowder Bay, another half hour, past gun emplacements and small beaches almost nobody uses. There is a ferry back from Taronga wharf, and a very good reason to have brought swimming things.

The last Sydney day goes east along the southern shore, which is where the harbour is at its best and where the fewest visitors are. Take the ferry or the 325 bus to Rose Bay and pick up the Hermitage Foreshore walk, which runs less than two kilometres through bush and past two small beaches with the bridge framed between the trees at every gap.

Milk Beach halfway along is the one people photograph and it is small enough to have to time. Come at high tide and there is very little of it.

Carry on to Watsons Bay at the harbour mouth and walk out to South Head. Hornby Lighthouse at the tip is painted in red and white vertical stripes, was lit in 1858, and exists because of the Dunbar, an immigrant ship that missed the entrance in a gale in 1857 and went onto the cliffs with the loss of a hundred and twenty one of the hundred and twenty two people aboard. Eat fish by the ferry wharf and take the boat back through the middle of the harbour at sunset.

A little over three hours east, over water the whole way, and the clocks go forward two hours in the New Zealand summer, which eats most of the afternoon. Biosecurity at Christchurch is thorough and slow: declare everything and clean your boots before you pack them.

The city you arrive in was two thirds demolished. On 22 February 2011 a magnitude 6.3 earthquake struck at lunchtime from a fault directly under the suburbs, and it killed a hundred and eighty five people, a hundred and fifteen of them in one office building. What has happened since is visible on every block: new low-rise on cleared lots, gaps that are still car parks, and the occasional stone facade propped up with steel.

The Anglican cathedral in the square lost its tower and has stood open to the sky ever since, while the argument about demolishing or reinstating it ran for a decade and the funding has stalled more than once. Two blocks away, the replacement is a temporary cathedral by Shigeru Ban made from ninety eight cardboard tubes, opened in 2013 and designed to last fifty years, which is more permanent than most temporary things.

The Avon loops through the middle of Christchurch and the botanic gardens sit inside one of its bends: twenty one hectares laid out from 1863 with an English conservatory, a rose garden and some very large exotic trees planted by settlers who missed home. It is free and it is the best hour in the city.

The punts go from the Antigua Boat Sheds, a green and white wooden building from 1882 that is the last of several and survived the earthquake. A punter in Edwardian dress poles you upstream for half an hour, which sounds unbearable and is quietly lovely.

In the afternoon, drive out to the gondola on the Port Hills. Christchurch sits at the edge of an eroded volcanic crater and the ridge above the city is its rim, so from the top you get the flat Canterbury Plains on one side running to the Southern Alps, and Lyttelton Harbour, which is the flooded crater itself, on the other. The road along the ridge is worth driving afterwards if the light holds.

Two hours and a bit up State Highway 1, most of it on the coast once you are past Cheviot, with the sea on the right and the Seaward Kaikōura Range coming down almost to the water on the left. There is nowhere else in New Zealand where the mountains and the ocean are this close together.

Look at the rock platforms as you come into town. In November 2016 a magnitude 7.8 earthquake ruptured more than twenty faults at once and lifted this stretch of coast by up to six metres, stranding a whole intertidal zone in the air, cutting the road and the railway and leaving Kaikoura reachable only by sea and helicopter for weeks. The pale bands of dead seaweed on the raised rock are still there.

Point Kean at the tip of the peninsula is where the fur seals haul out, in numbers, on the road and the car park as well as the rocks. They are wild animals with teeth and they will move faster than you expect, so keep twenty metres back and never put yourself between one and the water.

The reason sperm whales are here all year, when almost nowhere else has them reliably, is the shape of the seabed. The Kaikōura Canyon starts about a kilometre offshore and drops past a thousand metres, and where its cold upwelling meets a warm current the result is a permanent concentration of squid, which is what sperm whales eat.

The boats go out from the harbour south of town and take about three hours. The operation is owned by the local Ngāti Kurī people, was set up in 1987 when the town had almost no work in it, and they use hydrophones to find the animals rather than driving around looking. A sperm whale surfaces to breathe for about ten minutes and then dives, and the tail going up is what everybody is waiting for. Trips are cancelled in a serious swell and refunded.

In the afternoon, Fyffe House is a small colonial cottage from 1844 on the shore south of town, painted pink, and it sits on foundations made from whale vertebrae left over from the shore whaling station that stood here. It is the oldest building in Kaikoura and the last physical trace of what the boats used to do instead.

Three and a half hours northwest: up the coast past the seal colony at Ohau, inland at Seddon through the Marlborough vineyards, then over the Whangamoa and Rai saddles on a road that bends continuously for the last hour. Break it at Blenheim if wine is of interest, because this is where about three quarters of New Zealand's is grown.

Nelson claims to be the sunniest place in the country and has the numbers to back it up, and it feels different from anywhere further south: warmer, slower, full of potters and glassblowers and small breweries. The main street runs uphill to a cathedral that took forty years to build, from 1925 to 1965, and changed design twice while it was going up, which is why it looks like two buildings agreeing to differ.

The Suter opened in 1899, making it one of the oldest public galleries in the country, and it sits beside the Queens Gardens with a cafe over the water. Spend the late afternoon there and book tomorrow's water taxi tonight.

Abel Tasman is the smallest national park in New Zealand and the busiest, and the reason is straightforward: granite headlands, orange sand, water that is genuinely turquoise, and no serious climbing anywhere in it. The coast track runs sixty kilometres from Marahau to Wainui and most people walk a fraction of it.

The way to do it in a day is to let the boat do the distance. Water taxis leave from Kaiteriteri, an hour's drive from Nelson, and drop walkers up the coast at Bark Bay, Torrent Bay or Anchorage. Get taken to the far point and walk back towards the boat, which means the day gets easier rather than harder and you cannot miss the last departure by walking the wrong way.

The Anchorage to Marahau section is about twelve kilometres and takes four hours at a normal pace, with two tidal crossings on it that the timetable in every operator's office will tell you about. Swim at Te Pukatea, which is a perfect small horseshoe ten minutes off the main track and which most people walk straight past.

A short walk to finish. The hill above Botanical Reserve carries a marker calling itself the Centre of New Zealand, which is a survey point rather than a geographic fact, since the actual centroid is some way southwest in the Spooners Range. It takes twenty minutes up a zigzag path and gives you the whole of Tasman Bay.

Nelson airport is ten minutes from the middle of town and flies to Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch several times a day, so getting out of here is easier than the map suggests. Drop the car at the terminal.

If the schedule allows a longer last day, drive out to Rabbit Island or up the coast to Mapua, where an old wharf has become a set of small restaurants and a ferry across the estuary, and eat something outside before the flight.