Discover the end of the rainbow along New Zealand's Routeburn Track, where the colours of the spectrum curve above your head as you stand beneath a towering waterfall. There's no pot of gold, but the view's all the reward you need for having hiked steadily uphill into Fiordland National Park. The Routeburn is rated as one of the world's best long-distance trails. It crosses Fiordland's high mountains, giving spectacular views across native beech forest and glacial lakes to the distant Tasman Sea. The first few hours are the steepest, clambering over rocks and jumping between stepping stones over icy streams.
Sunlight filters through the canopy and dew glints on coiled ferns.
Walkers stay in private lodges with bunks in each room and the guides cook a three-course meal each night. In the morning, frost has settled and walkers shiver in thick fleeces, but by midday we're stripped down to T-shirts, hot from walking, even though the rocks still shine with black ice. On day two, trekkers stop for a picnic on a mossy slope overlooking a midnight-blue lake. Alpine parrots, known as keas, chirp on narrow ledges nearby and white clouds drift across the valley below, before disappearing over the next peak. A thousand years ago, a fleet of giant Maori canoes crossed the Pacific to land at Cape Brett in New Zealand's Bay of Islands.