We meet at Otopeni airport and head to the other side of the world, with a layover in Doha. The big crossing takes place at night: the Gulf, the Indian Ocean, and entry into Australia over the desert, in the morning.

We land in the evening. Between Bucharest and Melbourne there are ten time zones and a day lost in crossing - we leave on Friday, arrive on Saturday evening.

Transfer to the hotel, in the city center. Those who still have energy can take a walk along the Yarra River, where the city looks best at night.

Melbourne is best explored on foot and by tram—it's free in the city center. The city has built its life in laneways, the alleys between buildings: walls covered in street art at Hosier Lane, tiny cafes at Degraves, bars hidden behind unmarked doors.

We pass through Queen Victoria Market, the 1878 market covering seven hectares, and go up for the panorama from the eighty-eighth floor. In the afternoon, the Royal Botanic Gardens on the banks of the Yarra.

A full day on one of the most beautiful coastal roads in the world, built between 1919 and 1932 by soldiers returning from World War I — it's the largest war monument in the world, two hundred and forty kilometers long.

We stop at Kennett River, where koalas sleep in the eucalyptus trees by the road and can be seen from below, without binoculars. Lunch in a surf town, then the part we came for: The Twelve Apostles, limestone columns up to fifty meters high, broken off the cliff by the ocean. Eight remain. We continue to Loch Ard Gorge, a narrow cove between orange walls, and stay for the evening light.

Free morning in Melbourne. In the afternoon we head southeast, towards Phillip Island, two hours from the city.

We pass by the koala conservation center, where we walk on elevated boardwalks at canopy height, and by The Nobbies, wind-beaten rocks with a colony of fur seals offshore.

At sunset, we settle into the stands on Summerland Beach for the penguin parade: hundreds of little penguins — the smallest species in the world, thirty-three centimeters — emerge from the waves in groups and cross the beach towards their burrows. Photography is forbidden, even without flash: the light disorients them.

Three hours and twenty minutes of flight north and the climate changes completely: from the cool spring of Victoria directly into the tropics, at thirty degrees and humidity.

Cairns is a small city, built around departures to the reef. It has no beach — instead, it has an artificial lagoon on the promenade, with filtered water, where one can swim without worrying about crocodiles and jellyfish. The afternoon is free.

The day worth the trip here. Fast catamaran, an hour and a half, to the outer reefs - those offshore, where the coral is healthy and the water is clear.

We spend the day on a platform anchored on the reef: snorkeling as much as you want, with equipment and vest included, marine biologist guides in the water, buffet lunch on board. You can see corals of all shapes, parrotfish, entire schools of blue and yellow fish, and almost certainly green sea turtles.

For those who don't want to go in the water, there's a semi-submersible with glass walls, which takes the same route below the surface.

We go up into the mountains with the Kuranda Scenic Railway, the railway dug by hand between 1886 and 1891: one hundred curves, fifteen tunnels, and thirty-seven bridges, all in a one hundred eighty million year old rainforest — older than the Amazon.

The train stops above Barron Falls, which plunges one hundred and fifty meters. In Kuranda, the village at the top, we have time for the craft market and the butterfly park.

The descent is different: with Skyrail, the seven and a half kilometer gondola that floats right over the forest canopy, with two stops along the way for walkways among the trees.

Three hours of flying south, back into the temperate climate. We check into a hotel near Darling Harbour and go out for our first encounter with the harbor.

Sydney is best understood from the water, not from land: the city is built around a bay with two hundred and fifty kilometers of coastline, and the yellow ferries are common public transport.

In the morning, a guided tour inside the Opera House — the construction took fourteen years instead of four and cost fourteen times more than the budget, and the Danish architect left before completion and never saw his finished building.

We pass through The Rocks, the old quarter beneath the bridge, with sandstone houses from the early years of the colony, and take the ferry across the bay for the best view of the city.

In the afternoon, we go to Bondi and walk along the cliff path to Coogee: six kilometers along the edge of the cliff, past small beaches and rock pools carved into the stone, into which the waves crash.

Two hours west and we enter a sandstone plateau broken by deep valleys, covered with eucalyptus forest. Eucalyptus releases so much volatile oil that the light scatters into blue — the mist between the ridges is actually blue, hence the name.

We stop at the Three Sisters, three sandstone towers on the edge of the Jamison Valley, and descend with the Scenic Railway, the steepest passenger railway in the world: fifty-two degrees inclination. Down below we take a walk through the forest, on walkways, and go back up with the cable car suspended over the valley.

Three hours of flight over the Tasman Sea and two time zones ahead. We land in Auckland, the city with the most sailboats per capita in the world — hence the nickname, City of Sails.

The city is built on fifty-three extinct volcanic cones. In the afternoon we climb the Sky Tower, the three hundred and twenty-eight meter tower, and go down to Viaduct Harbour, the yacht port where dinner is eaten.

We head south through Waikato, the pasture land where there are more sheep than people. In Hobbiton we enter the village built for filming on a sheep farm and kept intact afterwards: forty-four round doors in the hill, carefully tended gardens scaled, the lake with the mill and the stone bridge.

We continue to Rotorua, the city located over an active geothermal field — you can feel it from the entrance, it smells of sulfur, and steam comes out of canals and yards. At Te Puia we see the Pohutu geyser, which erupts up to twenty times a day, up to thirty meters high.

In the evening, a hangi meal — meat and vegetables cooked for hours in the ground, on hot stones — and a Maori show, with haka.

Early in the morning we go to Wai-O-Tapu, the most colorful geothermal area in the country. Champagne Pool is sixty-five meters in diameter, boils at 74°C and has bright orange edges from arsenic and antimony deposits. Next to it, a fluorescent green lake and bubbling craters.

In the afternoon we fly to the South Island. The landing in Queenstown is one of the most spectacular in the world: the plane descends through mountains, turns over Lake Wakatipu and touches down on the runway in a valley enclosed by peaks.

The longest and most beautiful day. We leave early, next to Te Anau lake, and enter Fiordland National Park. The road climbs through the Eglinton Valley, between silver beeches and granite walls, passes by Mirror Lakes and enters the Homer Tunnel, one kilometer and two hundred meters carved through the mountain, with a single lane of traffic.

On the other side, we descend into the fiord. Two-hour cruise on the water, under Mitre Peak — one thousand six hundred ninety-two meters rising directly from the sea — and under the Stirling and Bowen waterfalls, which fall one hundred sixty meters. The boat goes right under them. Seals sit on the rocks, and sometimes dolphins and penguins appear.

Rudyard Kipling called the place the eighth wonder of the world. It rains here two hundred days a year, and that is precisely why the waterfalls are always full.

The morning is free in Queenstown — the city is the adventure sports capital of the Southern Hemisphere, and the optional activities below all depart from here.

At noon we head north, over Lindis Pass, through hills covered with golden tussock grass. We stop at Lake Pukaki, opaque turquoise from glacial flour — rock dust ground by glaciers, so fine that it remains suspended in the water and scatters light.

We sleep in the only village in the national park, at the foot of Aoraki, three thousand seven hundred twenty-four meters. In the afternoon we walk the Hooker Valley Track: three hours round trip, flat path, three suspension bridges over the river, and at the end a glacial lake with icebergs floating under the north face. In the evening light it's the best part of the day.

We descend to Lake Tekapo, of the same impossible turquoise as Pukaki. On the shore is the Church of the Good Shepherd, a stone chapel from 1935 where the window behind the altar has no stained glass: it looks directly onto the lake and the mountains. The area is an international dark sky reserve — among the best places on the planet for stars.

We continue towards Christchurch, the city rebuilt after the 2011 earthquake, with the cardboard cathedral by architect Shigeru Ban. In the evening, we board our flight home.

We fly west and regain the day lost on the way there. We land in Otopeni at noon.