In recent years, Mt Taranaki stood in for Japan’s Mt Fuji in The Last Samurai (with Tom Cruise) and the Southern Alps became the Himalayas for Vertical Limit. For visitors, that diversity means you can stroll along a sun-warmed beach in the morning, stop at a winery for lunch and be hiking along an alpine trail by the afternoon. Nowhere else in the world can you experience such a wide variety of different landscapes within a single day.

As an island nation, the coastline features high on the list of what makes New Zealand’s landscape unique. Straddling the Tasman Sea and the Pacific Ocean, and situated at a point where tropical northern currents converge with polar currents from the south, the surrounding waters are home to a wealth of marine species including seals, dolphins and whales. And in New Zealand you can get closer to these remarkable animals than you would ever have imagined possible. How about swimming with dolphins or watching whales surface from the comfort of a purpose-designed vessel just off the coast of Kaikoura?

Back on land, New Zealand’s coastline varies from golden-sand bays that tempt you to prop up a shady umbrella and relax awhile, to rugged beaches rimmed with slate-grey cliffs that echo the crashing surf. Throughout the summer months, the beaches of northern areas are often fringed with red-flowering pohutukawa – the much-loved native ‘Christmas Tree’ in a nation where Christmas falls in mid-summer. Visitors who enjoy boating will find paradise in the Bay of Islands, studded with dozens of emerald-green islands, in Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf, right on the doorstep of New Zealand’s largest city, and in the Marlborough Sounds, where ancient sunken valleys provide a bush-cloaked backdrop for sheltered boating.

Walkers flock to Abel Tasman National Park, in the northwest of the South Island, to enjoy the unique pleasure of hiking a gentle coastal trail through forest that grows right down to sandy coves. At the other end of the South Island, Fiordland National Park offers a very different experience – hiking amidst a rugged but astonishingly beautiful landscape of waterfalls, rainforest-clad cliffs and deep fiords, a landscape so precious that it is protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Area. A little further north, South Westland is home to two of the Southern Hemisphere’s most accessible temperate zone glaciers – seemingly defying the rules of nature, the blue-white rivers of ice at Fox and Franz Josef are fringed by green temperate rainforest. Walk to the glaciers or join a guided glacier climb to see these remarkable natural phenomena up close.

There are a number of other glaciers further inland at Mt Cook National Park. A flight-seeing expedition is an excellent way to see them in the context of the rugged Southern Alps, lorded over by New Zealand’s highest peak – Mt Cook. The Southern Alps, the South Island’s mountainous backbone, rises over 3,000 metres to divide east and west of the island. Toward its southern end, the Mackenzie Country and Central Otago are unforgettable regions tucked in amongst the mountains and home to popular lakeside resorts such as Wanaka, Queenstown and Lake Tekapo that offer a high standard of facilities and outdoor activities in a ruggedly beautiful alpine landscape.
 
In the North Island, too, iconic mountains dominate certain parts of the landscape. Mt Taranaki, on the North Island’s west coast, is an almost perfect cone rising from rolling hills – capped with a frosting of snow in winter, it’s a remarkable sight. In the Central North Island is a high-altitude plateau where State Highway One becomes the ‘Desert Road’ as it crosses a bleak landscape of wide plains overlooked by a forbidding triad of volcanoes. The tallest of these, Mt Ruapehu, is home to the North Island’s most popular ski resort and stood in as ‘Mt Doom’ in The Lord of the Rings.

North of Ruapehu is further evidence of the powerful geothermal forces that shaped the landscape. The sparkling waters of Lake Taupo, New Zealand’s largest lake, bigger in area than Singapore, are popular for boating, fishing and swimming in summer, but these tranquil pastimes belie the violence of the lake’s history – Lake Taupo owes its existence to a long-ago volcanic eruption. These days, the region stretching from Lake Taupo north to Rotorua is popular with visitors wanting to glimpse the earth’s geothermal forces at play. A thin crust in this part of the North Island results in a remarkable array of geothermal features; from bubbling mud pools to steam vents and thermal pools.   

From the North to the South Island and beyond, to the more than 700 offshore islands that make up this archipelago, New Zealand offers a diversity of geology, climate, flora and fauna that is, quite simply, astonishing. There is no other place on Earth quite like it.