A "highlights" tour of two countries means that you only scratch the surface of what is available. Aside from our time in Australia's outback, we were never far from the sea, and I loved our harborside hotels and ferry rides. As we traveled through New Zealand, we found ourselves in landscapes that felt oddly familiar, from their use as backdrops to the movies based on J. R. R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Another thing that struck me about New Zealand is that it has great varieties of stunning landscapes in fairly close proximity to each other. You can travel through flat farmland, steep, snow-covered mountains, and temperate rainforests in the space of a few hours....as if, in the United States, someone had put narrow slices of rural Ohio, the Rocky Mountains, and the Olympic Peninsula side by side.

View of Cairns harbor from our hotel, sunrise	Headlands at the entrance to Sydney Harbor	Rainbow Springs, Rotorua, NZ: park featuring local plants and animals (and California redwoods!)
Te Puia geothermal area (near Rotorua) in Te Whakarewarewa Valley	Franz Josef Glacier, South Island, NZ	New Zealand is full of moutain streams crossed by one-lane bridges
Lake and mountains, South Island, NZ	Brilliant blue of South Island river	Stream at The Chasm, near Milford Sound
Dramatic mists in Milford Sound (really a fjord, spelled "fiord" in NZ)	Steep sides of fiord and frequent rain guarantee numerous waterfalls	Another of Milford Sound's waterfalls
I climbed this hiking trail which parallels the Skyline gondola in Queenstown	Trees along trail on the steeply sloping hillside above Queenstown