Highlights of Australia with New Zealand & Cook Islands

Settle in for the long haul with a good film and a glass of something. You'll cross the world overnight and touch down in Melbourne, where a transfer to your hotel and a welcome drink with your Travelsphere Holiday Director eases you into Australian time.

Australia's culture capital rewards wandering: bluestone laneways strung with street art, hole-in-the-wall espresso bars, the Royal Botanic Gardens and the hallowed turf of the MCG. With free time built in, many guests head for Phillip Island to watch the little penguins waddle ashore at dusk.

Three nights in the city that needs no introduction. A guided tour takes in Bondi Beach, Hyde Park, Mrs Macquarie's Chair and Darling Harbour, with that first head-on view of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge that no photograph ever quite prepares you for. Free days invite an Opera House backstage tour, the BridgeClimb, or a day in the Blue Mountains to see the Three Sisters.

The emotional heart of the tour. You'll arrive in the Red Centre in time to watch Uluru at sunset, glass of sparkling wine in hand, as the rock burns through ochre, rust and deep violet. Next morning you return for sunrise — quieter, cooler, and somehow more moving — before exploring the 36 weathered domes of Kata Tjuta.

Deep in the Northern Territory you'll visit the Royal Flying Doctor Service base and the School of the Air, which teaches children scattered across an area the size of western Europe. In the evening, an authentic bush barbecue under a sky so thick with stars that the Milky Way casts a shadow.

Australia's most relaxed capital: mango trees, sunset markets at Mindil Beach and a wartime history worth an afternoon. It's the gateway to everything wild in the Top End.

A UNESCO World Heritage site twice over, for its landscape and its living culture. You'll stand before Aboriginal rock art at Nourlangie painted and repainted over tens of thousands of years, then cruise the Yellow Water Lagoon at the golden hour among jabiru, sea eagles and very large saltwater crocodiles.

Nitmiluk's thirteen gorges were cut through ancient sandstone by the Katherine River. A cruise through the sheer red walls, with freshwater crocodiles sunning themselves on the ledges, is one of the Territory's quiet masterpieces.

The big one. A catamaran cruise out to the Great Barrier Reef gives you time to snorkel over coral gardens, ride a glass-bottomed boat or simply float above the largest living structure on Earth. Free days in Cairns open up the Kuranda Scenic Railway and Skyrail over the canopy, or a crocodile-spotting cruise in the Daintree Rainforest.

Queensland's capital wraps around a lazy bend of the Brisbane River: South Bank's man-made beach, the Story Bridge, and subtropical warmth year-round. An optional day on North Stradbroke Island is a lovely last taste of Australian coast.

Cross the Tasman to New Zealand's biggest city, built across an isthmus between two harbours and studded with 53 extinct volcanoes. Take the lift up the Sky Tower, wander the Viaduct, or catch a ferry to the vineyards of Waiheke Island.

North to Paihia and the sub-tropical Bay of Islands — 144 of them, scattered across water the colour of bottle glass. You'll visit the Treaty House at Waitangi, where modern New Zealand was founded in 1840. Optional cruises run out to the Hole in the Rock, and a full-day trip heads up Ninety Mile Beach to Cape Reinga, where two oceans collide.

The ground here steams, bubbles and occasionally erupts. At Te Puia you'll see the Pōhutu Geyser fire up to 30 metres skyward and watch carvers and weavers at work. In the evening, a traditional Tamaki hāngi feast — food cooked in the earth, and a welcome, a haka and a performance that guests consistently name their favourite night of the trip.

New Zealand's windswept capital packs a lot into a small harbour: the cable car up to the Botanic Garden, the superb Te Papa museum, a serious coffee culture and a film industry hiding in the suburbs.

The ferry through the Marlborough Sounds is one of the world's most scenic crossings — three hours of drowned river valleys and forested headlands before the South Island opens up ahead of you.

Board the TranzAlpine, routinely voted one of the great railway journeys on Earth. In four and a half hours you climb from the Canterbury Plains through the gorges of the Waimakariri, over Arthur's Pass and down through beech rainforest to the wild West Coast.

A glacier that flows almost to sea level through temperate rainforest, which is as strange and wonderful as it sounds. Helicopter flights (optional) land you on the ice itself for a snow landing you will not forget.

Wrapped around Lake Wakatipu beneath the sawtooth Remarkables, Queenstown is pure alpine theatre. Ride the Skyline gondola for the view, take a jet boat through the Shotover canyons, or simply sit lakeside with a Central Otago pinot and watch the light change.

Rudyard Kipling's phrase, not ours. You'll cruise the fjord beneath Mitre Peak, past waterfalls that plunge more than 150 metres straight into black water, with fur seals on the rocks and dolphins in the wake — lunch included on board.

By boat and by foot into a living cave system, ending in a silent grotto where thousands of glow worms hang like a private galaxy overhead.

Scotland with better beaches: Dunedin's Victorian railway station is the most photographed building in the country. Along the coast the Moeraki Boulders lie half-buried in the sand like giant marbles, and the Otago Peninsula shelters the world's only mainland royal albatross colony.

Through Omarama and the astonishing turquoise lakes of the Mackenzie Basin, under the gaze of Aoraki / Mount Cook — New Zealand's highest peak and, thanks to a Dark Sky Reserve, one of the best places on Earth to look up at night.

The reward at the end of the road. You'll fly to Rarotonga and check into the Manuia Beach Resort, a small, low-slung boutique property right on the sand. Four nights of turquoise lagoon, hibiscus, snorkelling straight off the beach and absolutely nothing you have to do. A local representative is on hand throughout.

One last swim, then the flight back via Auckland — you cross the International Date Line on the way, so you arrive before you left. Time to start planning the next one.