New Zealand: Fiordland, Queenstown and Maori culture

I picked up the rental car at Queenstown airport, sat on the wrong side for a second, and remembered with a small jolt that here you drive on the left. Outside the windscreen the Remarkables were already showing off — a wall of grey mountains with snow still caught in their folds in early summer, because here the seasons are flipped and December is the warm season. New Zealand had been a daydream for years, and now it was a real road I had to actually steer down, gearstick in my left hand, heart somewhere up near the peaks.

The plan, if you can call it that, was greedy: both islands, every kind of landscape the country could throw at me — fjords in the deep south, geothermal steam and living Maori culture up north, glaciers, a turquoise lake or two, and as much empty road as I could fit between them. People warn you that you can't do New Zealand in one trip. They're right. I did a fast, hungry slice of it anyway, and it was more than enough to ruin me for flatter places.

The South Island: Queenstown's nerve and Fiordland's silence

Queenstown calls itself the adventure capital and earns the title without trying too hard. This is where the modern bungy jump was born, and you feel it in the air — there's a particular kind of person here, slightly wild around the eyes, who has just thrown themselves off something or is about to. I am not naturally that person. I watched a few jumps from a safe railing, felt my stomach lurch on their behalf, and then surprised myself by booking one. The fall is short and the regret is shorter; what stays is the lake and the mountains rushing up at you, ridiculous and beautiful, while you bounce on the end of a cord and laugh like an idiot.

But the moment that undid me was Milford Sound. You drive in through the Fiordland — a vast, dripping, ancient wilderness — and the road itself is half the show, threading past waterfalls and through a tunnel hacked into raw rock. Then the fjord opens up and Mitre Peak rises straight out of black water, sheer and impossible, often with cloud snagged halfway up it. I'd seen the photos. The photos do not prepare you for the scale, or for how quiet it is, the kind of quiet that has weight. I stood at the water's edge and felt very small in the best possible way.

« At Milford the mountains fall straight into the sea, and the silence has actual weight. »

Here's the honest part about staying connected, because it changed how I moved. New Zealand sits well outside the EU, so a European roam-like-at-home plan is no help here — I set up a local eSIM the moment I landed and it carried me through the towns and along the open roads, which is exactly where you need it: for navigating on the left, and for booking the timed slots into Milford Sound and the Great Walks. But the Fiordland itself, the trailheads, the backcountry? Real dead zones — no bars, nothing, for hours. I made my peace with that ahead of time, downloaded maps the night before, told someone roughly when I'd resurface, and let the no-signal hours be the whole point.

The North Island: steam, the haka and a culture that is alive

I flew up to the North Island and the country changed character entirely. Rotorua greets you with a smell first — sulphur, eggy and unmistakable — and then with geothermal valleys where the ground steams, mud pools plop like soup, and geysers throw scalding water into the air on their own schedule. It is also a heartland of Maori culture, and I want to be careful with these words, because it is not a show put on for me. I was welcomed onto a marae, watched a haka performed close enough to feel it in my chest, heard te reo spoken as a living language rather than a museum piece. There are protocols — tikanga — and you follow them: you take your shoes off, you listen, you don't treat sacred places like a photo backdrop. The Tongariro crossing, which I walked another day past steaming craters and a startling emerald lake, runs across mountains that are sacred too. None of this is folklore or scenery. It's a culture being lived, right now, and the right response is simply respect.

In between, New Zealand kept handing me small wonders. The glow-worm caves at Waitomo, where you drift in silence under a ceiling of living blue stars. Hobbiton near Matamata, unashamedly a film set and unashamedly lovely. Middle-earth ghosts everywhere, because half the country moonlights as the backdrop to those films. I never saw a kiwi — the bird is nocturnal and famously shy — but I heard one called out in the dark on a guided walk, and that felt right somehow, the country keeping a little of itself hidden.

What I take away

Two islands, every landscape — that was the promise, and the country over-delivered on it. Lake Pukaki so turquoise it looks edited, Aoraki/Mount Cook white above it, Franz Josef calving its ice, whales off Kaikoura, the Mitre Peak silence. But what I carry home isn't a single view. It's the feeling of a place that is huge and empty and generous, where the New Zealand dollar runs out faster than you'd like and the road never quite does, and where a culture older than any of it is still being lived out loud. Keep your data ready for the towns, let the fjords take your signal, and drive — carefully, on the left — into the biggest skies you'll ever see.

— Thomas, somewhere on a southern road with a peak in the mirror and no bars on the phone.