Itinerary · for one

Aotearoa · the South Island in autumn

A slow loop through Te Waipounamu in the shoulder of autumn · solo · fourteen nights. Queenstown for the first lake walks and a Fergburger eaten standing up. The Milford Road to Piopiotahi, an overnight cruise under cliffs that fall straight into the sea, and a glow-worm cave back in Te Anau. Wanaka with its single famous willow standing in the water and Roys Peak above it. Over the Haast Pass to the West Coast, where the rainforest runs right up to the blue tongues of Franz Josef and Fox, and Aoraki shows itself upside-down in tannin-dark Lake Matheson. Back inland for the Hooker Valley under Aoraki / Mt. Cook, the meltwater milky from the glacier. One last stretch in the Mackenzie — Tekapo’s stone chapel, hot springs at dusk, and the darkest sky in the country. Out via Christchurch — punting on the Avon, the rebuilt city, a Banks Peninsula day to Akaroa — before the flight north.

1 traveler 7 bases 14 nights 16 min read

v2 · May 11, 2026

Apr 15 · Day 1 · the first one

Wheels down at Queenstown. Then the lake.

Late April, the last warm light before winter. Out of Hong Kong on a Wednesday night, Auckland by dawn, Queenstown by mid-morning — Lake Whakatipu cold and clear under a sky that already smells of kānuka smoke. Fourteen nights ahead in Te Waipounamu — the poplars on the Clutha going yellow, snow already settling on the high shoulders of Aoraki, and a wet West Coast detour to stand on a blue glacier tongue before the loop swings back inland.

Begin the journey ↓

Apr 15 → Apr 29 · 14 nights · 7 bases · 650 km between bases

Chapter 01 · Apr 15–16 Days 1–2

Queenstown on the lake

A lake the colour of cut glass, a gondola up Bob's Peak, and the burger that everyone queues for at midnight.

2 nights

Land Queenstown ZQN · 10 min by Ritchies bus or taxi to the town centre

Local the old town is walkable; pick up the rental car on day two for Te Anau

Things to do

Lake Whakatipu loop on foot · the willows on the Esplanade going gold
Skyline gondola to Bob's Peak · the Remarkables across the lake
Fergburger at midnight · order the Tropical Swine and eat it standing up
TSS Earnslaw steamer across to Walter Peak · a Central Otago pinot at the homestead
Arrowtown an afternoon away · the Chinese miners' settlement under poplars

Autumn evenings drop fast — pack a fleece for the lake walk after the gondola comes down

Bookings

hotel Queenstown · 2 nights lake-side pending

flight HKG → AKL → ZQN pending

Single-night layover possible in Auckland if Air NZ schedule shifts

rental Rental car · pick up Apr 16, drop Christchurch Apr 24 pending

Chapter 01 · the story

The town is a wall of mountain and a sheet of lake. The Remarkables run a straight ridge along the eastern shore as if someone has cut the horizon with a draftsman's edge. Bungy was invented here in 1988 — that is the town's tone.

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The lake is called Whakatipu, which Ngāi Tahu say is the trough left in the earth when Matau the giant burned where he slept, and the steady rise-and-fall of the water — about 12 cm every five minutes, year-round, an actual measurable seiche — is the giant’s heart still beating under the schist. The water is the cold glacier-blue that doesn’t really photograph; phones render it turquoise and lose the bite of it.

At the top of Bob’s Peak the Skyline gondola spits you out at 790 m above the town and the view is theatrical in the way only glacier valleys are: the Remarkables rising 2,300 m in a single unbroken wall on the far shore, Cecil Peak square in the middle of the water like a stage flat, the town tucked into the gravel fan of Horne Creek. The luge runs are alongside, the paragliders launch behind, and the whole thing has the slightly stagey feel of a place that has been the world’s adventure capital since AJ Hackett strung a cord off the Kawarau Bridge.

Fergburger opens at 8am and closes at 5am and the queue at midnight in autumn is forty deep on the pavement, locals and backpackers and the hen-do girls in matching sashes, and the Tropical Swine — bacon, pineapple, lime aioli — comes out in a paper bag the size of a small lampshade. You eat it standing up under the Camp Street awning because there is nowhere to sit and because that is how it is done.

What stays after Queenstown is that the town is doing two contradictory things at once. The lake-and-mountain frame is one of the most quietly beautiful in the world; the town inside it is loud, branded, queue-deep, midnight-burger. Both are real. The gondola goes up at 9am and the willows on the Esplanade go gold through the third week of April and the bungy bridge has been operating continuously since the eighties. The place is not quiet, but it is on a quiet lake.

Chapter 02 · Apr 17–18 Days 3–4

Te Anau & Piopiotahi

Two hours of road to the wettest place in the country, a small boat under cliffs that fall straight into the sea, and a second night for glow-worms once the coaches have gone home.

2 nights

Drive Queenstown → Te Anau 2 hr · Te Anau → Milford 2 hr each way (no fuel beyond Te Anau)

Māori Piopiotahi · the fjord's older name, for the extinct thrush that once lived here

Things to do

Piopiotahi / Milford Sound overnight cruise · Mitre Peak from the water, Stirling Falls full, kayaks dropped at dawn
The Chasm walk · 20 min off the Milford Road, the river drilling through schist
Te Anau glow-worm caves · evening boat across the lake, the cave ceiling like a small inverted galaxy
Mirror Lakes pull-out · the Earl Mountains upside-down on a still morning
Kepler Track day-section · Brod Bay to Luxmore Hut bushline, half-day return from the control gates
Kea-spotting at the Homer Tunnel · do not feed them, they will tear the rubber off the car
Whitebait fritters at the Sandfly Café back in Te Anau

Fill the tank in Te Anau · there is no fuel on the Milford Road, and the afternoon weather closes in fast. The overnight cruise leaves Milford mid-afternoon and returns next morning — plan the second day around the return, not against it.

Bookings

hotel Te Anau · 1 night lake-front (return from cruise) pending

activity Piopiotahi overnight nature cruise · Real NZ pending

Sleeps on the fjord, kayaks at dawn — books out months ahead even in shoulder season

activity Te Anau glow-worm caves · evening tour pending

Chapter 02 · the story

Piopiotahi gets seven metres of rain a year. Mitre Peak rises 1,692 m straight out of the water with no foreshore to soften the climb. The cliffs are not weather. The cliffs are the weather.

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The Homer Tunnel approach is the part nobody warns you about. The road climbs the Eglinton Valley through tussock and beech forest, then bends into a wall of granite at the Homer saddle, and the tunnel itself is a 1.2 km single-lane bore cut by hand through the spine of the Darran Mountains between 1935 and 1953 — five men died in avalanches before it opened. There are no lights at the western portal. You drop out the far side into a hanging valley with kea on the car roof and the road descending 690 m in twelve kilometres of hairpins to the fjord.

The fjord itself is called Piopiotahi for an extinct thrush, and in the local tradition it was carved by Tū-te-raki-whānoa with an adze called Te Hamo. The science says glacier, ten kilometres of ice grinding down at the last ice age. Both answers are right. Mitre Peak is on the south side. It rises 1,692 m straight from the water with no beach, no shelf, no shoreline — just water, then rock, then sky. There is no other mountain in the country that does this.

The overnight cruise leaves at 16:30 from Deepwater Basin. The day-trip coaches are gone by then and the fjord goes quiet, genuinely quiet, the way only fjords go: water-lap, kea-yell, distant waterfall. Stirling Falls drops 151 m off the north wall and the boat noses the bow under it so the spray runs the length of the deck. Kayaks go in at dawn. The water is freshwater on top and seawater underneath — a four-metre tannin-stained layer floating on the saltwater, because the rainforest runs straight to the cliff edge and the rain takes the tannin with it.

What stays is the precise minute the rain stops. The cliffs do not dry — they cannot — but the falling-water count drops from hundreds to a dozen named ones, and you understand that every wet cliff is a waterfall. The fjord is not a postcard. It is a working hydrology, and the rain is doing the work in front of you.

Chapter 03 · Apr 19–20 Days 5–6

Wanaka & the poplars

One famous willow standing in the lake, a six-hour ridge above town, and a valley of yellow poplars running down the Clutha.

2 nights

Drive Te Anau → Wanaka 3.5 hr via the Crown Range (NZ's highest sealed road)

Māori the lake's name from Ōanaka — "place of Anaka", an early Ngāi Tahu chief

Things to do

#ThatWanakaTree at first light · the willow alone in the shallows
Roys Peak ridge · 16 km return, sunrise from the false summit if you start at 4am
Clutha River cycle path · poplars in full yellow, an easy half-day on a hire bike
Rippon Vineyard tasting · Central Otago pinot noir overlooking the lake
Kai Whakapai bakery for an anzac biscuit before the drive over the Haast Pass

Roys Peak is exposed above the tree line — the wind can flip a person at the false summit; check MetService before leaving

Bookings

hotel Wanaka · 2 nights lake-edge pending

activity Rippon vineyard tasting · afternoon pending

rental Hire bike · half-day on the Clutha pending

Chapter 03 · the story

Wanaka is what Queenstown was thirty years ago, and the locals are quietly determined to keep it that way. The willow in the lake — that willow, the one tagged a million times — is a single tree standing in 1.4 m of water, planted as a fence post in 1940.

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The drive in from Te Anau comes over the Crown Range Road, the highest sealed road in the country at 1,076 m, and the moment the road tips over the saddle the whole Wanaka basin opens up beneath you. Lake Wanaka is the fourth-largest lake in the country and sits at 277 m above sea level, fed by the Matukituki coming down from the Mt Aspiring snowfields. Where Whakatipu is theatrical, Wanaka is wide. The water is calm where Queenstown’s is choppy, and the town is one storey instead of four.

The willow stands about 200 m offshore at the Roy’s Bay end, a gnarled solitary tree growing out of the shallow water on a small gravel bar. It was a fence post that took root. There is a sign asking visitors not to climb on it, and most days you can count twenty people at sunrise lining up the same composition the Instagram tag #thatwanakatree already has six million versions of. The composition still works because the tree is, on its own merits, beautiful — single trunk, three main limbs, mid-autumn yellow, the Buchanan range as a frame.

Roys Peak is the other thing. The track is 16 km return and climbs 1,228 m up an open tussock ridge with no shelter, and the false summit at 1,300 m has the photograph everyone has seen — the narrow ridge running out toward the camera, the lake folded in behind. The wind on the ridge at 4am in autumn will go through a rain shell. People do it in the dark with headtorches to be at the false summit by sunrise. The track reopens after a lambing closure in late November; April still holds.

The Cardrona Hotel is on the road back to Queenstown, a yellow weatherboard pub built in 1863, the last surviving establishment of a goldrush settlement that had four hotels and a brewery. The front bar still serves Speight’s and a roast at lunchtime, and the bra fence down the road is exactly what it sounds like and is either a wonderful piece of folk art or completely ridiculous, depending on the hour.

Chapter 04 · Apr 21–22 Days 7–8

Franz Josef & the West Coast

Over the Haast Pass to the wettest coast in the country, where temperate rainforest runs right up to the blue tongues of two glaciers and Aoraki shows itself upside-down in a tannin-dark lake.

2 nights

Drive Wanaka → Franz Josef 3.5 hr over the Haast Pass through World Heritage rainforest

Out Franz Josef → Aoraki / Mt. Cook on day 9 · back inland via the Haast and Lindis Pass, then Twizel

Things to do

Franz Josef heli-hike · book with Franz Josef Glacier Guides, crampons on the blue ice above the icefall
Lake Matheson sunrise mirror walk · Aoraki and Tasman doubled in the tannin-still water
Fox Glacier valley walk · 1.5 hr return to the terminal face on a dry day
Hokitika Gorge swing bridge · the river an unreal teal-blue, an hour each way for the photo
Hokitika beach driftwood letters at dusk · the locals spell something new every week
Okarito wetlands kayak · NZ's largest unmodified estuary, kōtuku white herons if you're lucky
Glacier Hot Pools in Franz Josef village · three forest-edge pools for the rainy afternoon

West Coast weather is famously wet — heli-hikes get cancelled often. Build in a buffer day and accept a glacier-valley walk as plan B; the village has one main street and not much else for a rainy night.

Bookings

hotel Franz Josef · 2 nights village lodge pending

Te Waonui Forest Retreat or the Scenic Hotel — village beds fill fast in shoulder season

activity Franz Josef Glacier Guides heli-hike · weather-dependent pending

Book day one of the stay and keep day two as the reschedule buffer

Chapter 04 · the story

The Māori name is Kā Roimata o Hine Hukatere — the tears of Hine Hukatere, frozen by the gods after her lover Wawe fell from the heights. The glacier is grief, in the original telling. It is also the only one in the world that ends inside a rainforest.

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The Haast Pass road from Wanaka is two-lane tarmac through the Mt Aspiring National Park, and it gets wet about thirty kilometres in. The West Coast catches the prevailing westerly square in the face — Hokitika gets 2,900 mm of rain a year, Franz Josef village 5,000 mm, the glacier head somewhere over 13,000 mm — and the rainforest that results is podocarp and rimu and southern rātā, all dripping, the road shoulders thick with crown fern and tree ferns six metres tall.

The glacier itself is a 12 km tongue of ice descending from a 30 km² névé in the Southern Alps, and it is doing two things at once. The névé sits at 2,400 m where the snow falls. The terminal face sits at 240 m in the rainforest. The ice between them moves 1.5 m a day at the steep sections — fast enough that the surface is cracked into seracs and crevasses, the blue ice exposed where the white has fallen away. The glacier has retreated about 2 km since the 1980s. The valley walk goes to a roped-off viewing point well short of the toe; the only way onto the ice now is by helicopter.

The heli-hike is twenty minutes on the pad, then a four-minute flight up the valley, then four hours on the ice in crampons. The pilot lands on a flat shelf at about 800 m where the guides have cut steps with ice axes since dawn. You walk through a landscape that exists nowhere else in the country — blue caves, moulins draining meltwater straight down, the sound of running water under your boots — and the cloud ceiling sits at about 1,400 m above you, hard and grey. The flight gets cancelled about one day in three in autumn. There is no compensation other than a refund.

Lake Matheson is the consolation prize on the wet days. The track loops the lake in an hour and the tannin-dark water — stained by the rotting fern leaves on the forest floor — gives the mirror reflection of Aoraki and Tasman that puts the Mackenzie postcard to shame. The reflection works only at dawn before the wind comes up. The forest around the lake is silent in the way old-growth rainforest is silent: the canopy absorbs the sound and you walk in a green box.

Chapter 05 · Apr 23–24 Days 9–10

Aoraki / Mt. Cook

The cloud-piercer above the meltwater. Ten swing bridges, a glacier lake at the head of the valley, and a sky with no light pollution for a hundred kilometres.

2 nights

Drive Franz Josef → Mt. Cook Village ~6 hr back inland via the Haast Pass, Lindis Pass, and Twizel

Māori Aoraki · "cloud-piercer", the tūpuna ancestor of Ngāi Tahu

Things to do

Hooker Valley Track · 10 km return, three swing bridges, glacier lake at the end
Mueller Hut route to Sealy Tarns · the "stairway to heaven", 2200 steps up
Tasman Glacier viewpoint · 40 min return for the icebergs in the terminal lake
Kānuka-smoked salmon at the Old Mountaineers' Café · Sir Edmund Hillary used to drink here
Dark-sky walk from the Hermitage · Aoraki Mackenzie Reserve, no torches needed once your eyes adjust

Mt. Cook Village has one fuel pump and no supermarket · top up at Twizel on the way in. DOC bookings for Mueller Hut sell out months ahead even off-season

Bookings

hotel Mt. Cook Village · 2 nights pending

Hermitage or YHA-Aoraki — village has only a handful of beds

activity Tasman Glacier boat tour · weather-dependent pending

Chapter 05 · the story

Aoraki means cloud-piercer, and at 3,724 m he is the tallest thing in the country by 660 m. In the Ngāi Tahu telling he is the eldest son of Rakinui the sky father, frozen into stone when his waka capsized — the South Island is the waka, overturned, and Aoraki is the prow.

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Mt Cook Village is one road, one pub, one fuel pump, and the Hermitage Hotel sitting under the mountain like a small grey chapel. The drive in along the western shore of Lake Pukaki is forty minutes of straight tarmac with the mountain growing in the windscreen the whole way, and the lake — milk-blue from glacial flour, the rock dust ground so fine it stays suspended in the water year-round — is the second-largest lake in the country and sits at 532 m. The colour does not photograph. It looks fake. It is not fake.

The Hooker Valley Track is the day-walk that everyone does and nobody regrets. It is 10 km return on a graded gravel path, three swing bridges over the Hooker River, the valley floor flat enough that you can do it in trainers. The first swing bridge bounces under your feet. The second crosses the silt-grey Hooker just above the confluence with the Mueller. The third lands you in a moraine field of broken schist and tussock at the foot of Hooker Lake, where icebergs the size of cars float in milky meltwater and Aoraki sits 2,400 m straight above your head. The wind funnels down the valley off the glacier. It is cold even in April.

The Mueller Hut route is the other one. The track climbs 1,000 m in 5 km — Sealy Tarns is the false flat at the halfway point, the stairway-to-heaven 2,200 wooden steps you climb out of the beech forest into open tussock — and Mueller Hut sits at 1,800 m on a ridge above the Mueller Glacier, looking straight across at Aoraki and the Caroline Face. The hut sleeps 28 and books out a year ahead. On a clear night up there the Milky Way is a band overhead bright enough to read by, and the avalanches off Mt Sefton across the cirque rumble through every hour or so like a distant goods train.

The dark-sky reserve sits above it all. The Aoraki Mackenzie International Dark Sky Reserve was gazetted in 2012 — 4,300 km² with no street lights, no backlit signs — and on a moonless night the sky is a thing you stand under rather than look at. Orion is upside-down. The Magellanic Clouds are clearly visible to the naked eye.

Chapter 06 · Apr 25–26 Days 11–12

Lake Tekapo

A small stone chapel on a turquoise lake, an observatory above the lupins, and a hot pool to soak in while the southern stars come up.

2 nights

Drive Mt. Cook → Tekapo 1 hr along the eastern shore of Lake Pukaki

Out Tekapo → Christchurch CHC ~3 hr on day 13 via Geraldine and the Canterbury plains

Things to do

Church of the Good Shepherd at dawn · the altar window framing the lake
Mt John summit stargazing tour · 10pm departure, telescopes on the ridge
Tekapo Hot Springs · three pools at lake temperature, lake temperature, and hot
Astro Café on Mt John for a flat white · the view is the whole Mackenzie Basin
Hokey-pokey ice cream from Kohan · eaten on the jetty before the drive to Christchurch

The dark-sky reserve enforces a town-wide lighting ordinance · do not bring a torch on the Mt John walk, your eyes need 20 min to adapt

Bookings

hotel Tekapo · 2 nights lake-view pending

activity Earth & Sky Mt John stargazing · late tour pending

Cancels in cloud; book early in the stay for a reschedule buffer

Chapter 06 · the story

Takapō is the small lake at the edge of the Mackenzie Basin where the Church of the Good Shepherd has sat since 1935 with no electricity wired in. The altar window frames the lake. Above the village, on Mt John, sits the country's professional observatory.

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The lake is the colour of antifreeze, glacier flour from the Godley River suspended in the water and lit from below by an April sun that comes up at 7:14 and sets at 18:08. The Church of the Good Shepherd is a stone box thirty paces long built by the runholders of the Mackenzie Country in 1935 — Esther Hope’s design, schist boulders gathered from within five miles of the site, oak beams, and a single window behind the altar that frames the lake instead of a stained-glass saint. There is no power. The evening services are by candlelight. A small bronze of a collie sits on a plinth alongside the church, dedicated to the working dogs of the high country runs without which the sheep stations would not have been possible.

The hot pools sit at the lake edge five hundred metres along the foreshore, three terraced pools at 36°C, 38°C, and 40°C, the hottest of them just hot enough to be uncomfortable for the first minute. The view from the pool is straight across the lake at the Two Thumb Range. In late November the lupins along the foreshore come up purple and pink and blue, the introduced Russell hybrids that everyone photographs and ecologists hate because they are strangling the braided-river ecosystems. In April the lupins are gone but the willows are gold.

Mt John University Observatory sits at 1,029 m on the small hill at the north end of the lake — eight kilometres up a private gravel road — and operates four research telescopes, including the 1.8 m MOA telescope hunting for microlensing exoplanets. The late-night tour leaves the visitor centre at 10pm in winter and later in summer, no torches, eyes adapting on the walk from the car park to the dome. The guide shows Jupiter through the 16-inch Meade, then the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, then the Southern Cross and the two pointers, with the entire Milky Way running corner to corner overhead bright enough to throw a faint shadow.

What stays from Tekapo is the quiet. The dark-sky reserve enforces a town-wide lighting ordinance — sodium-yellow streetlamps shielded downward, no backlit signage — and at midnight on the foreshore there is no glow from the village behind you. Just the lake, the church silhouette, and a sky that is doing the work it has always done, finally visible.

Chapter 07 · Apr 27–28 Days 13–14

Ōtautahi · Christchurch

A reinvented city of container shops and a cardboard cathedral, a slow punt down the Avon, and one last harbour day at Akaroa before the flight back to the world.

2 nights

Drive Tekapo → Christchurch ~3 hr via Geraldine and the Canterbury plains

Out CHC → AKL → HKG · morning of day 15 · drop the rental at the airport the evening before

Things to do

Punting on the Avon at the Antigua Boat Sheds · a boater-hatted pole-man, the willows over the water
Banks Peninsula day to Akaroa · French-settled harbour towns, Hector's dolphins on the cruise out
Cardboard Cathedral · Shigeru Ban's transitional A-frame, paper tubes and stained glass
Quake City + Canterbury Museum · the only way to understand what the city has been through
Riverside Market for a long lunch · two floors of South Island producers under one roof
Christchurch Tram loop · the heritage circuit through the rebuilt centre, a good first-afternoon orientation
Sumner Beach dawn walk · Cave Rock, surfers in the cold, the last sea air of the trip

Post-2011 quake the city centre is still a patchwork · embrace the Re:Start container shops and the new architecture rather than expecting a pre-quake cathedral skyline. The old ChristChurch Cathedral is mid-rebuild — admire the scaffolding, do not plan around the interior.

Bookings

hotel Christchurch · 2 nights boutique central pending

The Observatory Hotel or Mayfair — walk to Riverside Market and the tram loop

rental Rental car drop-off · CHC airport evening of day 14 pending

flight CHC → AKL → HKG · day 15 morning pending

Air NZ NZ516 to AKL is the early-bird option that connects to the Cathay daytime back to HKG

Chapter 07 · the story

On 22 February 2011 at 12:51pm a 6.3 quake on a previously unknown fault under the city killed 185 people and brought down most of the central business district. Ōtautahi is a city rebuilding in public, fifteen years on, and the rebuild is the story.

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The first thing on the ground is the gaps. The old central business district was three hundred Victorian and Edwardian buildings on a grid laid out by the Canterbury Association in 1850, and the February 2011 earthquake brought down or required the demolition of about two-thirds of them. The ChristChurch Cathedral in the square is still half-collapsed, scaffolded, the spire gone, the reinstatement project a decade in and another decade to go. Walking the four avenues you cross car parks where buildings stood, then a brand-new glass-and-timber office, then another car park. The grid is intact. The fill is patchy.

Shigeru Ban’s Transitional Cathedral — the Cardboard Cathedral — sits on Hereford Street where St John the Baptist used to be. It opened in 2013 and was meant to last fifty years. The A-frame roof is built from 98 cardboard tubes 600 mm in diameter, polyurethane-coated, sitting on a concrete base, with stained glass triangles in the western end made from the surviving fragments of the old cathedral’s rose window. The acoustics inside are extraordinary — the cardboard absorbs the hardness that stone gives — and on a Sunday morning the place is full of people who remember exactly where they were at 12:51pm.

Re:START started life in October 2011 as a pop-up mall of shipping containers stacked on the empty Cashel Mall block, the first retail to come back into the central city after the quake. It was meant to last six months. It closed in 2018, and the colourful container aesthetic was absorbed into the permanent rebuild — the Riverside Market, the Little High eatery, the container-style food trucks at the Margaret Mahy playground. The city decided the look it had been forced into was actually the look it wanted, and kept it.

The botanic gardens on the bend of the Avon are the constant underneath. The Avon — Ōtākaro to Ngāi Tahu, “place of a game” — winds through them in long lazy loops, and the punts leave from the Antigua Boat Sheds where they have left from since 1882, oak-poled by a polerman in boater and striped jumper, the willows trailing in the water exactly as they did before the quake. Some things the city decided to keep exactly as they were. That is also the rebuild.

Apr 29 · Day 15 · the last one

Last morning in Ōtautahi. Then the flight home.

Two weeks gone. After Tekapo there was Christchurch — the Avon under the willows, a cardboard cathedral, one long Akaroa harbour day for Hector's dolphins. CHC by morning, Auckland by lunch, Hong Kong by midnight. Fourteen nights — every one of them yours, the green-blue of the glacial water already half-remembered.

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