March in Oceania: The Southern Alps

March is the best month in the South Island and the least crowded of the good ones. The February peak has gone home, the weather settles into long anticyclonic runs, the sea and the lakes are at their warmest of the year, and the first colour comes into the poplars around Wanaka and Arrowtown in the last week. Days run to twenty-two or twenty-four degrees and the nights are cold enough to want a fire.

Eleven nights, all of it South Island unless you want a city at the end. Five based between Queenstown and Wanaka, four at a lodge in the high country where the nearest other building is a long way off, and two in Fiordland. We do not chase the whole country. New Zealand looks small on a map and is not, and members who try to do both islands in a fortnight spend the fortnight in transit.

The set pieces are worth doing properly. A ski-plane landing high on the Tasman Glacier, Milford or Doubtful Sound early enough to have the water to yourself, and a heli-drop onto a back-country river. March is the end of the trout season and the best of it: the fish are large, the water is low and clear, and a good guide will walk you a long way for one cast. Central Otago is picking at the same time, so the cellars are working and the tastings are real rather than staged.

Auckland and Christchurch take long-range aircraft comfortably. Queenstown is the constraint: it sits in a bowl, it needs a terrain-qualified crew and a satellite-based approach, and the north-west wind can shut it for an afternoon. We plan Christchurch as the alternate every time rather than as an afterthought. New Zealand biosecurity is strict and unusually thorough on private arrivals, so we brief crew and passengers before departure rather than on the ramp.

Among our preferred hotel partners only Park Hyatt Auckland operates here, on the Viaduct Harbour, and it is the right first or last night. Everything in the south is a small owner-run lodge taken whole, which is the only sensible way to do it and the reason the second week works at all.

Ask your advisor about a private guide and helicopter held for the full stay rather than by the day, exclusive use of the lodge for a family group, and whether the last week of March is worth waiting for if you want the autumn colour.