Danny de Hek

It's New Zealand's best kept secret - a paradise for nature lovers with abundant tracts of wilderness, golden beaches, sparkling lakes and tumbling rivers.

Follow the Pacific Coast Highway out of Auckland and within three hours you will enter a land of blue skies, balmy temperatures, sparkling seas and sweeping landscapes.

The lower North Island is characterised by prosperous farming along the western coastal plains and the expansive hill country sheep stations on the Wairarapa Coast.

Visit a chosen land where warmth, hospitality, fine wines and gourmet foods delight visitors all year round. Marlborough has a beautiful varied landscape of golden tussock downland, rich green beech forests, wide braided rivers and stark lofty mountains.

From the blue Pacific, across the patchwork quilt of Canterbury Plains to the snow-caped Southern Alps, this region is a mighty adventure playground.

Towering peaks, dense rainforest and broad coastal plains dotted with exquisite kayaking lakes like Brunner, Kaniere and Ianthe (remnants of the Ice Age) characterise mid Westland.

Come visit the ‘Top of the South’ and enjoy a seductive mix of sun, sand, whitewater, arts and crafts, fresh fruit, fine wines and succulent seafoods.

Drive one hour north of Christchurch and you enter a rural lifestyle of irresistible charm. North Canterbury is an exquisite part of New Zealand where you will find ample space for complete recreation and rejuvenation.

If you want to go deeper, steeper, wetter and wilder in the wilderness this is the place for you. North Westland has almost limitless adventure possibilities - whitewater rafting, underground tube rafting, heli-rafting, jet boating, caving, mountain biking and horse trekking.

Southern New Zealand embraces some very dramatic coastlines, braided river valleys, golden-brown tussock hills and glaciated slopes of the Southern Alps.

Discover a world untouched by man - a true wilderness where deep ocean meets towering peaks. Fiordland National Park is the largest park in New Zealand and just the wildest, wettest and most isolated part of the country.

Enter the untouched wilderness of New Zealand’s South West World Heritage Area. It is a vast pristine nature-lover’s paradise, filled with the grandeur and spectacle of Mt Cook, the Southern Alps and the Fox and Franz Josef Glaciers.