Twelve days on New Zealand's South Island: the drive is the holiday

Get on the tram first. It runs a fifty minute loop through the middle of the city on a hop-on ticket, and on a first afternoon it does the one thing a map cannot: it shows you which parts of Christchurch are old, which are new, and which are still empty lots.

The reason for all of that is the earthquake of 22 February 2011, which killed 185 people and brought down most of the buildings inside the four avenues.

Get off for the Transitional Cathedral. When the Gothic one in the square was wrecked, the diocese asked the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who has spent his career designing emergency buildings out of paper, for a replacement. He gave them a triangular hall of cardboard tubes six hundred millimetres across, under a polycarbonate roof, with a stained glass window at the front reworked from the old rose. It opened in 2013, it was meant to last twenty years, and it is still in weekly use.

Eat on the curved pastel terrace of 1932 shopfronts that the tram threads through, which survived when almost nothing around it did.

Christchurch calls itself the Garden City and for once the nickname holds. Hagley Park and the botanic gardens together cover about a hundred and ninety hectares immediately west of the centre, with the Avon looping through the middle of them.

Start on the water. Punts leave from a green and white timber boat shed from 1882 at the southern corner of the park, poled from the stern by somebody in a striped blazer and a boater. Half an hour under the willows, and unapologetically silly.

Then walk into the gardens: glasshouses, a rose garden, a herbaceous border and enormous exotic trees planted in the 1860s, all free.

In the afternoon, the art gallery back in town. It is the largest in the South Island and free, and its history says a good deal about the place: it spent five years after the earthquake as the civil defence headquarters, with the emergency operation run out of the exhibition halls, before reopening as a gallery at the end of 2015.

Collect the car and drive south west. It is 227 kilometres and about three hours across the Canterbury plains, which are flat, enormous and dull for the first hour, then start to lift into the foothills with the Alps showing on the right.

Tekapo appears suddenly: a lake of an implausible milky turquoise, the colour coming from rock flour ground up by glaciers upstream and held in suspension. On the shore is a small stone church built in 1935 with a plain window behind the altar framing the lake and the mountains, which is the most photographed building in New Zealand and, at seven in the morning before the coaches, still quiet.

In the afternoon walk up the hill behind the village. The track climbs through pine plantation and then bare grass to the research station at the top, about three hours return, with the lake below and the Southern Alps across the basin.

The reason to sleep here is the sky. This whole high basin is a protected dark sky reserve, the lighting is shielded by law, and the observatory runs guided night tours with telescopes. Book ahead, avoid the days either side of a full moon, and dress for a cold hilltop.

Another 260 kilometres, most of a morning, south past the turnoff to the country's highest mountain, through the Lindis Pass, which is bare tussock hills the colour of a lion, and down into Central Otago.

Queenstown arrives all at once as you come over a rise and see the lake with the Remarkables standing in it. The town is small, loud and organised entirely around selling experiences, and the setting is genuinely extraordinary regardless.

Check in, then take the gondola. It starts a few streets back from the waterfront and climbs Bob's Peak steeply enough that the cars feel briefly wrong, and the platform at the top looks across the whole basin. There is a luge track and a viewing deck, and this is the best place in town at sunset.

Then join the queue for the burger, which everybody does once.

Twelve hours, and worth every one. Milford Sound is about three hundred kilometres from Queenstown by road, four hours each way, and the drive is a large part of it: down the length of Lake Wakatipu, across the tussock of the Te Anau basin, then up a glacial valley of beech forest and waterfalls to a tunnel bored straight through the mountains, with a steep descent on the far side.

Take a coach unless you are confident. The road is single lane in places, it closes for avalanche risk, and there is no fuel for the last hundred and twenty kilometres. Coaches also stop at the mirror lakes and the Chasm, which self drivers usually skip because they are chasing a boat departure.

The sound is a fiord, cut by ice and drowned by the sea, with walls rising over a kilometre straight out of the water. The peak on every poster is 1,692 metres and rises almost sheer from the surface. The cruise runs out towards the Tasman and back in about ninety minutes.

It rains here about two hundred days a year and the wet ones are better: hundreds of temporary falls appear on the rock faces within minutes of a downpour. Two of the permanent ones run whatever the weather, and the skippers take the front of the boat straight into the spray of one.

Twenty minutes east of town, on the old road to Cromwell, the Kawarau river runs through a gorge crossed by an 1880 suspension bridge. In 1988 two New Zealanders started charging people to jump off it, which is where the whole commercial industry begins. The drop is forty three metres, it is the only jump here that takes two people at once, and the deck out over the water is free to walk onto whether or not you intend to use it. Watching is a legitimate way to spend an hour.

The road carries on into a valley of pinot noir vineyards with cellar doors along it and a cycle trail through the vines.

Then turn north to Arrowtown. Gold was found in the Arrow river in 1862 and the town that went up around it is still there: a main street of low wooden and stone shopfronts under enormous sycamores and poplars, which is why the place is mobbed for three weeks every autumn.

Past the last shops, at the western end, is the Chinese settlement. Several hundred Chinese miners worked these claims from the 1860s, mostly on ground the Europeans had abandoned, and lived apart under a good deal of official hostility. What survives is a scatter of tiny stone and iron dwellings beside the creek, restored and left open. Twenty minutes, and the most affecting thing in the district.

The jetboat is the Queenstown thing worth doing even if the bungy is not. The Shotover river runs through a narrow rock canyon a few kilometres from town, and the boats were built for exactly this: flat bottomed, jet driven, drawing about ten centimetres, able to run at speed within a metre of a cliff. Half an hour, several full spins, and rather more rock than most people expect.

In the afternoon, walk out into the gardens on the peninsula. They occupy a spit of land jutting into the lake, planted with enormous conifers a century ago, with a pond, a frisbee golf course and a shingle beach where the water is snowmelt cold and people swim anyway. It is the one part of Queenstown that is not selling anything.

Then pack, because tomorrow the road goes over the highest sealed pass in the country.

A short day. Wanaka is only seventy kilometres away, but the road that gets there is the highest sealed one in the country, climbing over a thousand metres onto an open saddle in a series of switchbacks with a lookout at the top facing back over the whole Queenstown basin. In winter it needs chains and most people take the long way round through the gorge.

Wanaka itself is what Queenstown was before it became an industry: a quieter town on a bigger lake, with a cinema that serves cake at the interval and a foreshore that people simply sit on.

The two things to do on the edge of town are unashamedly odd. One is a maze and illusion house that has been quietly confounding people since 1973: a kilometre and a half of wooden corridors stacked over two floors, a tilted room, a room full of holograms, and a set of Roman toilets that visitors sit on and photograph each other in. The other is a hangar of aircraft, cars, motorcycles, fire engines and about sixty thousand toys, assembled over decades by one man who did not stop.

Then eat by the water and go to bed, because tomorrow is the Haast Pass.

The best drive of the trip. It is 285 kilometres and about four hours: north along the lake, then up the Makarora valley and through the Haast Pass, which is the lowest of the three crossings of the Southern Alps and the wettest. The vegetation changes completely as you go over the divide, from dry tussock and beech to dripping temperate rainforest, and there are waterfalls beside the road the whole way down.

At Haast the road meets the sea and turns north up a coast with almost nothing on it: a hundred and twenty kilometres of surf, driftwood and bush with one settlement in the middle. Fill up at Haast, because there is nothing after it.

Franz Josef is a single street. In the late afternoon, drive four kilometres up the valley and walk the last stretch to the glacier viewing area. The track runs along a rocky riverbed between walls a thousand feet high, and the ice sits at the head of it. The glacier has retreated a long way in recent decades and the walk is longer than it used to be, which is its own kind of information.

It is a temperate glacier that comes down through rainforest to about 300 metres above sea level, which is very unusual and is the reason this village exists.

You can no longer walk onto the glacier from the valley floor; the terminal face became too unstable when it retreated. The only way onto the ice is by helicopter, which lands you high on the glacier for a guided walk of two or three hours with crampons, and it is expensive and it is the reason most people come here.

It is also cancelled constantly. The rain here is measured in metres a year and the flights need a clear window over the ice, not just over the village. Book the first slot of the morning, be ready to go at short notice, and treat a cancellation as normal rather than bad luck.

If it flies, the rest of the day is yours and you will want it. If it does not, the valley has walks that fill a wet day properly: a tramping track climbing high above the ice to a lookout, and a shorter one to a set of water tunnels cut for a gold sluicing scheme, which you walk through in the dark with a torch and water over your boots.

Whatever happens, get a hot pool at the end of it. The village has them, and after a day on ice or in rain they are the correct decision.

175 kilometres north, a comfortable morning, with the sea on the left the whole way and the Alps appearing and disappearing on the right. It is a good road and an easy morning.

Ten kilometres short of Greymouth, turn off for the reconstructed gold town. It is a replica rather than a survival, which sounds worse than it is: a mill, a sluice, a jail, a bank, a fire station, a schoolhouse and a Chinatown, several of the buildings genuinely relocated from elsewhere on the coast, plus a steam train that runs a few times a day on a line laid through the bush for the timber, and panning for gold at the end of it where people do find flakes.

Then into Greymouth, which is a working town at a river mouth with the West Coast's brewery in the middle of it. It has been making beer here since 1868 and the tour runs about an hour and ends where you would expect.

Eat, and check the train time for tomorrow.

The last morning is short, because the train leaves in the early afternoon.

Walk out along the breakwater at the river mouth. The Tasman comes in here with nothing between it and Australia, the swell breaks over the wall, and there is a viewing platform at the end where you can watch the boats come over the bar, which is one of the more difficult harbour entrances in the country.

Then get on the TranzAlpine. It runs from Greymouth to Christchurch in about four and a half hours, up the Grey valley, up the Otira gorge, through an eight kilometre tunnel under the main divide, over Arthur's Pass, and down through the limestone gorges of the Waimakariri to the plains. One carriage in the middle is open to the weather on both sides, and people spend most of the journey standing in it.

It is the correct ending. Twelve days of driving through this island, and the last leg of it spent looking out of a window with somebody else at the controls.