The Wonders of Australia with New Zealand

Westbound to Western Australia, the most isolated major city on earth. Because Perth is only seven hours ahead of the UK rather than eleven, the jet lag is noticeably kinder than flying into Sydney.

Three nights to recover and explore. Kings Park sits above the city with 400 hectares of bush and the best skyline view in Australia. Fremantle, 30 minutes away, is all convict-era limestone, harbour pubs and a Sunday market.

The ferry to Rottnest Island is the optional day most people take — car-free, white sand, and 10,000 extremely photogenic quokkas.

A city laid out on a grid and ringed entirely by parkland, with the Barossa and Adelaide Hills within an hour. The Central Market has been running since 1869 and is the best food hall in the country.

A third of the island is protected, and the wildlife has never learned to fear people. Sea lions doze on the beach at Seal Bay with no fence between you; koalas wedge into the forks of gum trees; and the Remarkable Rocks sit on a granite dome above the Southern Ocean like abandoned sculpture.

Built by returning First World War soldiers as a memorial and a job scheme, and now one of the world's great coastal drives. Surf beaches, rainforest gullies, and then the Twelve Apostles — limestone stacks stranded offshore as the cliffs retreat.

There were never twelve. There are currently seven.

After the Great Ocean Road, Melbourne feels like a different country to the one you have been crossing. Bluestone laneways, hole-in-the-wall coffee, arcades and galleries, and a sporting obsession that borders on religious.

Two nights, with the Queen Victoria Market and the Royal Botanic Gardens both walkable, and the Phillip Island penguin parade available as an evening excursion.

By the time Sydney appears you are two weeks in and thoroughly acclimatised, which is the best way to meet it. The guided tour covers Bondi, Mrs Macquarie's Chair and Darling Harbour, but the moment everyone remembers is rounding the corner at Circular Quay and seeing the Opera House shoulder to shoulder with the Bridge.

Two free days follow. The coastal walk from Bondi to Coogee is the local's choice; the ferry to Manly costs the price of a bus fare and is the best value sightseeing in Australia.

Nineteen days in, the tour turns inland and the scale changes completely. You reach Yulara in the afternoon and head straight out for sunset at Uluru, sparkling wine in hand, watching 550 million years of sandstone cycle through orange, blood-red and finally a deep bruised violet.

The following morning is the one people talk about afterwards: back before dawn, far fewer people, the light arriving from behind you, and a silence that city visitors find genuinely disconcerting. Then Kata Tjuta, the 36 domes the early surveyors called the Olgas.

A town of 25,000 people, 1,500km from the nearest city in any direction. You'll visit the Royal Flying Doctor Service, which covers an area the size of western Europe from this single base, and the School of the Air.

Then an evening bush barbecue under a sky so clear the Milky Way is a solid band of light rather than a smudge.

Kakadu is World Heritage-listed twice over, for its landscape and for its living culture, and it is roughly half the size of Switzerland. At Nourlangie you stand in front of rock art galleries painted and repainted across hundreds of generations.

The Yellow Water cruise runs at the golden hour, when the billabong fills with jabiru, sea eagles, magpie geese and saltwater crocodiles that are considerably larger than the boat feels.

Nitmiluk is a series of thirteen sandstone gorges carved by the Katherine River, and you cruise through the first two with walls rising sheer on either side.

Freshwater crocodiles sun themselves on the ledges. Unlike their saltwater cousins in Kakadu they are no threat to anyone, which the guides will tell you repeatedly and you will continue to find hard to believe.

Four nights in tropical north Queensland, built around a catamaran cruise out to the Great Barrier Reef. You get time in the water over the coral, a glass-bottomed boat for anyone who would rather stay dry, and a semi-submersible.

The free days are where Cairns earns its keep: the Kuranda Scenic Railway up through the Barron Gorge and the Skyrail cableway back over the canopy, or a crocodile cruise on the Daintree River.

Queensland's capital is built around a lazy bend in the Brisbane River and is the most liveable of the Australian capitals in the least showy way. South Bank has a man-made beach in the middle of the city, and the ferries are the nicest way to get anywhere.

A three-hour flight and you are in a country that feels nothing like the one you just left. Auckland sprawls across an isthmus between two harbours and sits on 53 dormant volcanoes, several of which are now parks you can walk up in twenty minutes.

The Sky Tower gives you the geography in one go; the ferry to Devonport gives you the nicer version of the same view.

Three nights at Paihia, on a sub-tropical coastline scattered with 144 islands. The Waitangi Treaty Grounds are the reason to come: the 1840 agreement signed here between the Crown and Māori chiefs remains the founding — and still contested — document of modern New Zealand.

Optional cruises run out to the Hole in the Rock, and a long day trip heads up Ninety Mile Beach to Cape Reinga, where the Tasman Sea and the Pacific visibly collide.

Rotorua smells of sulphur within thirty seconds of arrival and you stop noticing within an hour. At Te Puia the Pōhutu Geyser fires up to 30 metres, mud pools belch, and the carving and weaving schools keep traditional crafts in daily practice.

The evening is a Tamaki hāngi — a welcome, a challenge, a performance and a feast cooked in the earth. It is the single most-mentioned evening of the whole tour in our reading of guest feedback.

Wedged between hills and harbour, Wellington packs more into a small footprint than any other New Zealand city. The cable car climbs to the Botanic Garden; Te Papa, the national museum, is free and genuinely excellent.

Three hours from Wellington to Picton, and the last hour — threading through the drowned river valleys of the Marlborough Sounds — is among the most scenic ferry passages anywhere. Stay on deck for it.

Four and a half hours across the spine of the South Island, and routinely named among the world's great rail journeys. You climb from the flat Canterbury Plains into the gorges of the Waimakariri, over Arthur's Pass, then drop through beech rainforest to the West Coast.

There is an open-air viewing carriage. It is cold and it is worth it.

Few places put ice and temperate rainforest this close together. The glacier has retreated substantially in recent decades, so the valley walk is longer than it was — but the scale of the ice face is undiminished.

Optional helicopter flights include a snow landing on the névé above.

Wrapped around Lake Wakatipu beneath the sawtooth ridge of The Remarkables, Queenstown is where New Zealand does spectacle. The Skyline gondola is the easy win; jet boats through the Shotover canyons are the loud one.

Central Otago pinot noir is made within half an hour of town and is very good indeed.

The road in is half the experience: through the Homer Tunnel, hewn by hand through solid rock, and down into a valley that receives around 7 metres of rain a year.

The cruise runs beneath Mitre Peak, which rises 1,692 metres straight out of the water, past waterfalls that fall more than 150 metres. Fur seals on the rocks, dolphins if you are lucky, and lunch on board.

By boat across the lake, then on foot into a cave system still actively being carved by an underground river. The final chamber is reached in a small punt, in complete darkness, beneath thousands of glow worms.

Dunedin is Edinburgh's southern namesake and looks it — the railway station is the most photographed building in the country. On the coast, the Moeraki Boulders lie half-buried on the sand, near-spherical concretions weathered out of the cliffs.

The Otago Peninsula holds the world's only mainland royal albatross colony.

Time to head for the airport with a camera roll you'll be working through for months. Your overnight flight returns you to the UK.