I believe we have at least one NZ FSUer, although I would be curious if there were more.
It’s now been over eight years since I’ve been there so I am dredging up some memories, but I remember spending a lovely day on Waiheke island visiting wineries. You can take a ferry there from Auckland. We also stopped in Devonport for brunch, which was nice. The only thing is that I would not recommend doing the wineries right before getting on an 11 hour flight
Not sure how far north you are planning on going but if you go up past Whangerei to the Bay of Islands area, you can visit the Treaty House at Waitangi, which I thought was a well done way of bringing together the British and Maori history. We also went swimming with the dolphins in the same area, at Russell. However, this option is only for extremely strong swimmers (which I’m not), as you are out in the open ocean without a life jacket. I mostly stayed on the boat although I still thought it was cool to be that close to the dolphins even on the boat.
I spent several days on the Coromandel peninsula and remember driving out to Cathedral Cove and Hot Water Beach. At the time I was there, there was a big controversy that Cathedral Cove was going to have its first ever ice cream stand, so it was not very commercialized. I’m curious if it stuck around or if things became even more commercialized.
The only place I went in the South Island was Queenstown and my favorite part of that trip was seeing Milford Sound, although we had to get up very early to drive the four hours to get out there to catch a boat but it was worth it. It was beautiful. The drive was also really pretty, through the mountains, so it wasn’t that bad to have to do all that driving in a day.
I’m sure there was plenty more but those are the main things that stick out. Also, I was there with someone who was from there so I was spending a lot of time with his family and friends and visiting his old haunts so I sometimes was doing things of less general interest.