The Itinerary Oceania
Far, expensive, and unlike anywhere else on this list.
Australia
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The Red Centre and the Top End in 10 days: Uluru, Kings Canyon, Kakadu
Alice Springs and the gorges, the Kings Canyon rim walk, Uluru and Kata Tjuta on foot, then a flight north to Kakadu's floodplains. Why you fly between the two halves, which seasons close which roads, and the heat rules that are enforced rather than advised.
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Australia in 10 days: Sydney, the Reef and Melbourne
The east-coast grand tour: the Opera House and a harbour that shows off, the Great Barrier Reef by pontoon, Melbourne's laneway espresso religion and the Great Ocean Road — plus the subclass-600 visa played correctly (apply months out), the slip-slop-slap sun rules, and why nobody tips.
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Australia and New Zealand in 16 days: Sydney, Uluru, the Reef and the South Island
A harbour city, a monolith in the middle of a continent, the largest living structure on earth, and then three hours across the Tasman to a South Island of glaciers and fiords — the long-haul trip people do once and plan around for years.
New Zealand
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New Zealand's South Island in 10 days: Milford, the glaciers and Aoraki
The South Island loop with enough time to stop: Aoraki under a dark-sky reserve, Milford Sound at the end of a two-hour road with no fuel, the West Coast glaciers and Arthur's Pass back. Driving times that look wrong on a map, and the sandflies nobody warns you about.
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New Zealand in 12 days: both islands, one road trip
Hobbiton's front doors, a geothermal city that smells of sulphur and legends, the mountain amphitheatre of Queenstown and a fiord that's better in the rain — both islands in 12 days, with the visa maths, the driving truths and the booking order that make both islands work in twelve days.
Pacific Islands
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Cook Islands in 8 days: Rarotonga and the Aitutaki lagoon
One island you can circle by bus in 50 minutes, and another whose lagoon is three times the size of the island inside it — turquoise water a metre deep for kilometres, sandbars you stand on in the middle of the sea, and a 45-minute flight between the two.
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Fiji in 9 days: the Yasawas, Viti Levu and a village stay
Three hundred islands, one catamaran that links the best of them, and a welcome that is not manufactured: manta rays in a channel, limestone caves you swim into, a village kava ceremony done properly, and reefs straight off the beach — with the boat-pass maths and the two seasons that decide the price.
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French Polynesia in 10 days: Tahiti, Moorea, Huahine and Bora Bora
The version of these islands that isn't an overwater bungalow: family pensions, a ferry, an island-hopping air pass, and four islands with different characters — Moorea's green spires, Huahine's quiet, Taha'a's vanilla, and Bora Bora's lagoon, which does deserve the reputation.
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Kiribati in 8 days: Tarawa's battlefield, North Tarawa and the atoll nation
A country of 33 atolls spread across three and a half million square kilometres of ocean, holding a 1943 battlefield still littered with guns and wrecks — and a second half, 3,000 kilometres east, that is effectively a separate country to visit.
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Marshall Islands in 7 days: Majuro, the Bikini wrecks and the nuclear legacy
Twenty-nine atolls averaging two metres above sea level, a stop on the Island Hopper that most people fly over, and the lagoon where the United States sank a captured fleet in 1946 to find out what a nuclear weapon does to warships.
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Micronesia in 9 days: Chuuk Lagoon, Nan Madol and Yap's stone money
Four island states strung across 2,700 kilometres of Pacific, holding sixty Japanese ships sunk in a single raid in 1944, a stone city built on artificial islets six hundred years ago, and an island where money is a carved disc too big to move.
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Nauru in 4 days: Topside, Command Ridge and the smallest republic
Twenty-one square kilometres, one road, and an interior of limestone pinnacles left behind when the phosphate that made it briefly one of the richest countries on earth was dug out and shipped away.
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Palau in 8 days: Blue Corner, the Rock Islands and Jellyfish Lake
Four hundred mushroom-shaped limestone islands on the UNESCO list, a wall dive where you hook onto the reef and watch sharks hold station in the current, and a marine sanctuary covering eighty per cent of the country's waters.
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Papua New Guinea in 10 days: Huli wigmen, the Sepik and the birds of paradise
Highland valleys unknown to the outside world until the 1930s, spirit houses on a river where carving is a religion, and most of the planet's birds of paradise — reached entirely by light aircraft, at a price and with a security picture the guide states plainly.
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Samoa in 8 days: To Sua, the lava coast and Savai'i
The Pacific island where the old social system never broke: you sleep in an open-sided fale on the sand for a few tala, swim down a ladder into a garden sinkhole filled with sea water, walk across a lava field that swallowed a village, and watch blowholes fire coconuts a hundred feet into the air.
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Solomon Islands in 9 days: Iron Bottom Sound, Marovo Lagoon and Tetepare
A stretch of sea holding dozens of warships sunk in a few months of 1942, the world's largest saltwater lagoon, and the biggest uninhabited island in the South Pacific — in a country where almost all the land is still owned under custom.
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The South Pacific in 13 days: Fiji's Yasawas, Samoa's To Sua and whales in Tonga
A chain of islands reached by a boat that works its way up it, a swimming hole thirty metres down a lava tube, and the whales that come to Tonga to calve — three countries that share an ocean and very little else.
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Tonga in 8 days: swimming with humpbacks in Vava'u, 'Eua and Tongatapu
Humpback mothers and calves in sheltered water where swimming with them is licensed and regulated, a trilithon raised eight hundred years ago, blowholes firing along five kilometres of coast — and a Sunday on which the entire country stops.
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Tuvalu in 4 days: Funafuti, the runway and the conservation area
Nine atolls with a highest point under five metres, where the international runway doubles as the village green until a siren clears it twice a week — and where there is almost nothing to do, which is the point.
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Vanuatu in 9 days: Mount Yasur, blue holes and the Coolidge
The most accessible active volcano on earth, where you walk to the crater rim after dark and watch lava thrown into the sky from a few hundred metres away — plus freshwater blue holes you swim in, a 200-metre liner you can dive inside, and villages where the old ways are not a performance.
