Maori dinner and geyser viewing under the stars after the (great) dinner was probably my favorite experience, although there truly were many.
Flying back from Milford Sound after sailing around Milford Sound; the 4X4 ride to Lord of the Rings filming sites and going to the LOTR studio museum were great.
The day walk through Sydney, including walking through the old town, across the iconic bridge, touring the Sydney Opera House; walking around the craters, sunset and sunrise at Uluru, my spa visit in Rotorua, seeing the stars in the southern hemisphere, the fantastic botanic gardens, and especially the guided tour of the Royal Botanic Garden in Melbourne were absolutely fabulous! Learning about opals and jade, viewing the Southern Alps, taking the ferry down to Christchurch, attending a rugby match with our guide, who was willing to explain the game. I love history and geology, and there is plenty of both on this tour, and our guide was pretty well-versed in all of it. He also was a great story-teller which really helped pass the time on our bus rides. And the bus was pretty comfortable and bus driver was great!
I gave a 4 instead of a 5 for 3 reasons, because it really was a wonderful trip of a lifetime. The 2 reasons are: the food offerings were not outstanding for the most part; for example, we went to a nice seafood restaurant, and the seafood choice was beautiful prawns that were breaded and fried, and batter-fried calamari. I did not expect that fried food would be our choice at a nice seafood restaurant. Another restaurant at the Pullman was unable to serve the 42 in our group in a timely manner, and the food was just ok - my beef had a 3/8" layer of fat across the top with just a skin of caramelization - gross. We did have a couple of very nice lunches - Bruny Island, for example, and the lunch at the winery was also very nice.
The second reason: the hotel rooms were very nice! but very few of them had any place for us to lay out our suitcases. When we are only in a hotel for 2 nights, we live out of our suitcases, and we had to hoist them up onto the bed to get into them and then close them and put them down on the floor so we could use the bed for sleeping - in almost every hotel. It would be nice if they had the little stands or tables for us to allow us to leave suitcases open.
The third reason were the Jetstar flights - people were very nice and I love that they load from the front and the back of the airplane, but their check-in process was quite chaotic, and they don't even provide complimentary water on the flights. However, Qantas flights were fabulous.
