Dunedin

Beset by the rugged hills and green-clad ridges of the Otago Peninsula, it’s hardly a surprise that Scottish colonists chose this spot to settle as they drifted past the shores of South Island in the 19th century; it must’ve looked just like home! And if it didn’t feel like home, city-planner Charles Kettle and the minister Thomas Burns (yes, a direct relative of Rabbie the bard no less) certainly did their best to make it so, raising Romantic Victorian frontispieces around the central Octagon, crafting buildings in the likeness of the Royal Mile itself, and even imbuing their new town with a bona fide Gaelic moniker: Dùn Èideann (meaning Edinburgh).

So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise if in Dunedin, tour guides extoll the virtues of New Zealand haggis, locals bellow through bagpipes on the street corners, or you discover an honorific effigy of Robert Burns dotting one of its squares. Just embrace the Scottish fervour and dutifully wonder at that opulent railway station, sip frothy ales and attempt to evoke the spirits of Skye in the hills around super-steep Baldwin Street, before coming back to the South Pacific to carve the waves at St Clair or scale the cliffs at Tunnel Beach.