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.