Highlights of Australia with New Zealand

Roughly 22 hours in the air with a stop en route. Set your watch to Melbourne time as you board and try to sleep on their schedule — it genuinely helps.

Landing in Melbourne rather than Sydney is a quiet advantage: it is smaller, calmer and easier to navigate on day one with a body clock nine hours out.

The city tour covers the essentials, then free time opens up the laneway bars, the Royal Botanic Gardens and — for the keen — the MCG, which holds 100,000 people and is treated as a national monument.

Sydney rewards a slow approach. The organised sightseeing handles the checklist — Bondi, the Rocks, Mrs Macquarie's Chair, Darling Harbour — and leaves two full days for whatever you actually came for.

Our advice: spend one of them on the water. Sydney is a harbour city first and a city second, and nothing on land explains it as well as forty minutes on a public ferry.

The Red Centre is the emotional centre of the whole trip, and this itinerary times it correctly. Sunset first, with a glass of something cold as the colour drains and then floods back. Sunrise next morning, cold enough for a fleece, and worth every minute of the alarm.

Uluru rises 348 metres and runs several kilometres underground. It is also a living Anangu cultural site, and the walks you do here — Mala, Kuniya — are chosen with that in mind.

The MacDonnell Ranges rise straight out of the desert either side of town. You'll see the Royal Flying Doctor Service base and the School of the Air before the evening barbecue and stargazing.

It is a short stop, but it does something useful: it reframes the emptiness you have been flying over as somewhere with a working economy, a history and a community.

Darwin was flattened by Japanese bombing in 1942 and again by Cyclone Tracy in 1974, so almost nothing is old. What it has instead is an easy tropical rhythm and the best seafood in the Territory.

Two days in a park the size of a small country, taking in the Nourlangie art site and the wetlands that make this landscape so improbably fertile in the dry season.

The Yellow Water cruise is the highlight — go with low expectations about crocodile sightings and you will be very pleasantly corrected.

The Katherine River has cut thirteen gorges through ancient sandstone here. A cruise takes you between walls seventy metres high, past freshwater crocodiles that regard the boat with complete indifference.

Sail out to the largest living structure on the planet — 2,300km of it, visible from space. Snorkelling is included and genuinely enough; the best coral sits in shallow water where the light is strongest.

With four nights here, the Daintree, Cape Tribulation and the Atherton Tablelands all come into range as optional days.

A relaxed couple of days in a city that rarely gets its due. The Botanic Gardens, the West End's food scene, and an optional day trip to North Stradbroke Island for beaches, dolphins and a barbecue lunch.

Your introduction to New Zealand, and a deceptive one: Auckland is by far the biggest city in the country and nothing else you see will be remotely like it.

Walk up Mount Eden for the crater and the panorama, or take the ferry across to Devonport for the afternoon.

A sub-tropical corner of a temperate country. You'll visit the Treaty House at Waitangi, which does an honest job of presenting a complicated history from both sides.

Three nights allows a cruise and still leaves a day to do very little in a place that is well suited to it.

Steam rises from drains, parks and the edges of the lake. Te Puia is the centrepiece — the Pōhutu Geyser performs roughly twenty times a day — and the evening Tamaki experience is a genuine cultural welcome rather than a floor show.

The wind is not a myth — it funnels through Cook Strait and the airport approach is legendary among nervous flyers. The city itself is compact, walkable and disproportionately good at coffee and museums.

You leave a capital city and arrive, three hours later, in a small town surrounded by forested inlets. The South Island is emptier, wilder and colder, and the change is immediate.

The TranzAlpine runs from Christchurch to Greymouth through country no road follows closely. Book a window seat, then abandon it for the open viewing carriage.

A glacier descending to 300 metres above sea level at latitude 43 — a combination found almost nowhere else. The walk to the terminal face takes you up a valley scoured bare within living memory.

The setting does most of the work. Lake Wakatipu is 80km long and shaped like a lightning bolt; the mountains come almost to the water. Optional jet boats, gondolas and the Walter Peak steamship dinner.

Fiordland is the largest national park in New Zealand and almost entirely roadless; Milford is the one place you can drive to. The cruise takes you to the open sea and back beneath sheer walls with lunch served aboard.

A short cruise, a walk through limestone passages loud with running water, then silence and a ceiling of blue-green light.

New Zealand's first city, built on gold money, with the architecture to prove it. Wildlife is the other attraction: albatross, sea lions and yellow-eyed penguins all on the peninsula.

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.

Transfer to the airport for the flight back to the UK. You will cross the International Date Line and lose most of a day somewhere over the Pacific.