New Zealand | An Odyssey

There are countries you visit and countries that change you. New Zealand, approached properly, is emphatically the latter. This 28-night journey from Cape Kidnappers to the Bay of Islands was designed to move through the country at the pace it demands — slowly, with attention, and with enough time in each place to feel it properly. It began high above the Pacific on a 6,000-acre working sheep and cattle station at Rosewood Cape Kidnappers, and continued to Huka Lodge on the banks of the Waikato River, where a day spent fly-fishing with Māori outdoorsman Tom Loughlin in the wilderness of Taupō was among the quietest and most extraordinary of the trip. Abel Tasman's golden coastline explored by canoe, beginning with a traditional karakia at the water's edge. Three nights on a 19,600-hectare high-country sheep station in the Ashburton Lakes, where evenings ended under a sky with no light pollution for fifty miles in any direction. A night aboard the Fiordland Jewel sailing the mirror-still waters of Milford Sound. And finally Minaret Station — a lodge accessible only by helicopter, set in a glacial valley in the Southern Alps, where the only sounds were the wind and the mountains. Twenty-eight nights that covered two islands, eleven properties, and a country that rewards curiosity in a way very few places on earth can match.