Otago, New Zealand

Otago is the region that contains both the country's best-known adventure town and its best-known student town, and the two are three hours apart. Queenstown and Wanaka are the lakes-and-mountains end with the bungee jumps, the ski fields and the genuine adrenaline industry; Dunedin is the Scottish university city on the coast; Central Otago between them is the pinot noir region that has become genuinely world-famous in twenty years and the landscape of schist rock and thyme that goes with it; Arrowtown is the preserved gold-rush village; and Oamaru is the town with the whitestone Victorian buildings, the steampunk museum and the penguins that come ashore in the harbour every evening.

The region's character is tourism-and-wine at the top end and student-and-farming at the bottom, with the gold rush having built most of the towns and the wine having rescued the economy a century later. The mountains are genuinely alpine and the winter is real.

Expect real wine and adventure talk, genuine ski-season content, and a region where the two best industries arrived a hundred years apart.

Nearby: Queenstown Dunedin Christchurch Southland