Luxury New Zealand Voyages

New Zealand's largest city rises from no fewer than fifty extinct volcanic cones, several of them, like Mount Eden, an easy climb for a full harbor view. The City of Sails' waterfront has been reinvented around Wynyard Quarter and Britomart's warehouse-turned-restaurant precinct, drawing on some of the country's best produce and wine lists. A short ferry ride puts Waiheke's vineyards within easy reach for anyone who doesn't linger in town. Volcanic, maritime and increasingly serious about its food.

New Zealand's founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi, was signed on the lawn at Waitangi in 1840, and the treaty grounds tell that complex history with real depth. Beyond the history, the bay itself is one of the country's great game-fishing waters, marlin drew Zane Gray here nearly a century ago, and dolphin pods still work the same channels daily. The colonial town of Russell, once a rough-and-ready whaling port, now offers some of Northland's best waterfront dining. History, wildlife and a well-earned reputation for the water in between.

The world's first island granted International Dark Sky Sanctuary status has almost no mains power and barely any light pollution to compete with it, making its night sky one of the clearest anywhere in New Zealand. Kiwi roam the bush here in numbers rare on the mainland, while natural hot springs at Kaitoke reward a short forest walk. Mobile signal drops out almost entirely once you're off the wharf, an increasingly rare kind of genuine escape. Wild, dark and deliberately undeveloped.

Christchurch has rebuilt itself with real ambition since the 2011 earthquake, a new cathedral square, riverside gardens and an innovative container-mall precinct standing where rubble once did. Its historic port, Lyttelton, tunnels through the hills separately and has its own tight-knit, artsy character worth a wander in its own right. Banks Peninsula, just beyond, shelters Akaroa's French-founded harbor town and some of the only reliable sightings anywhere of Hector's dolphin, the world's smallest and rarest marine dolphin. Canterbury's vineyards and a strong new dining scene round out a region very much back on its feet.

Leveled by a catastrophic 1931 earthquake and rebuilt almost entirely in the fashionable style of the day, Napier is now one of the most complete and best-preserved Art Deco cities on the planet, its pastel facades a genuine architectural pilgrimage. Cape Kidnappers, a short drive along the coast, holds the largest mainland gannet colony in the world, tens of thousands of birds nesting in full view. Hawke's Bay's Gimblett Gravels have become one of New Zealand's most serious wine districts, its Syrah and Bordeaux-style blends now taken seriously well beyond the region. A disaster turned, deliberately, into a design statement.

Picton sits at the head of the Marlborough Sounds, a drowned river valley system of forested inlets that the Queen Charlotte Track threads for four days for anyone with the time. It is also the gateway to Marlborough, the wine region that put New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc on the world's tables, its vineyards a short and scenic drive from the wharf. The Sounds shelter the king shag, a rare cormorant found nowhere else on earth, alongside dolphins and fur seals. Greenshell mussels from nearby Havelock round out a region built on both wine and water.

New Zealand's third and least-visited main island offers the best real chance in the country to see a kiwi in the genuine wild, rather than behind glass, its birds are unusually active by day here thanks to an absence of mammalian predators. Barely four hundred people live on Rakiura, as the island is known in Maori, and its International Dark Sky Sanctuary status makes for some of the clearest stargazing in the Southern Hemisphere. Predator-free Ulva Island, just offshore, is a working sanctuary for some of the country's rarest birds. About as far south, and as wild, as New Zealand gets.

A thirty-minute ferry from downtown Auckland delivers an entirely different pace of life, more than thirty boutique wineries share this one small island, many with cellar-door lunches looking straight out over the Hauraki Gulf. Olive groves, art galleries and a genuinely excellent dining scene have grown up alongside the vines over the past few decades, while sheltered beaches ring the coastline for a swim between tastings. Auckland's wine country, without ever leaving the harbor.

New Zealand's compact, hilly capital has built a reputation on precisely the things that fill a short visit well, a world-class national museum in Te Papa, a coffee and craft-beer scene that rivals any city its size, and Zealandia, a fenced urban sanctuary where takahe and kaka have returned to a capital city for the first time in generations. Wind off Cook Strait keeps the city famously bracing, but a cable-car ride up to the botanic gardens rewards it with one of the best harbor views in the country. Weta Workshop's props and creatures, built for Middle-earth, are a short drive from the wharf. Small, sharp and unmistakably creative.

Milford Sound's wilder, larger cousin takes three times as long to reach and rewards every extra mile of it, Doubtful Sound sees a fraction of the visitors and correspondingly more silence, the Sound of Silence being its unofficial nickname among those who know it. Rain-fed waterfalls drop hundreds of meters down sheer, forested walls into water so still it mirrors them perfectly on a calm morning. Bottlenose dolphins and fur seals work the fjord's mouth, and Fiordland crested penguins nest along its more sheltered arms. A slow, wordless cruise through some of the most untouched wilderness left in New Zealand.