Hello, dear readers; a bonus postcard for you. I wasn’t going to publish this because it felt a bit off-topic, but then it seemed a waste to not. K and I just had our first break off the farm in four years, travelling to Queenstown.
It’s heavy country down there when it comes to farming, mountains, glacier lakes, rivers, and canyons. Covered in snow or dry as a bone. In the middle of all that rock is Queenstown. Originally a farming outpost, it was bought by the government when gold was discovered. These days, it’s a tourist town, or trap, should I say, and it’s a very strange place to visit if you are a Kiwi.
To fly into Queenstown, the jets have to be sequenced. The town is at an altitude of around 340m but is surrounded by peaks that can stretch to 2000m. The planes have to pop over a mountain range and drop into a valley that stretches down to a tiny airport. Sequencing involves air traffic control managing a line of planes that move down the valleys in turn; it’s one of the most challenging airports on the planet and an absolute roller coaster of a ride.
The wind coming up the valley creates waves, and as we go negative g’s at one point, the passengers scream, the woman next to me grabs my hand, and K, ever the stuntwoman, whoops in excitement. The mountains rush by on either side in close proximity as the plane air brakes and points its nose down into the valley before hitting the tarmac hard and breaking like a race car.
The first thing you notice when you are out of the airport is the fact you are surrounded by mountains. It’s unusual terrain for most Kiwis and there is a lot of empty land out here, stretching all the way to the Tasman Sea, mostly inaccessible.
The second thing you notice is the tourists, all shapes and sizes, all languages and accents, some highly inappropriate clothing for the sizes I might suggest, and tour operators wrangling people like shepherds herding sheep.
It’s summer here and warm. Summer can see temperatures going over 30 deg C, while in winter, it will get down to -9 deg C. The drive into town is a slow crawl; the outpost is notorious for its bad traffic. As we pass through the CBD, a long line of people wait for a Ferg Burger, made famous many years ago by Lonely Planet. Everything is very pretty, covered in stone, or made from stone, clean, and packed with tourists.
Hotels are perched on the lake edge or the hills, and rows and rows of townhouses and apartments worth a ridiculous amount of money line the roads. The traffic crawls on, and we head up a steep road to find our accommodation, all the while wondering how the hell early farmers made a living out here without dying in droves.
One of the things that become quickly apparent to us is that Queenstown is a gigantic ripoff when it comes to prices. It’s like a ghost of the old gold-mining town it once was. It certainly pays to shop around.
A quick look at bottle store prices tells us that they are charging roughly twice the price in other parts of the country. A bottle that might be $25 at home is $50 in the bottle store and as much as $75 in a bar. One place we visit is charging $16.50 for a Heineken. Food prices are similar, nearly twice as much as anywhere else in the country. It ain’t cheap, but if you shop around, you find good food, good beer, and really good service at reasonable prices.
And, of course, there is always preloading. I didn’t think I’d get to fifty and have to preload, but the old small-town instincts remain strong.
William Gilbert Rees would see the irony in all this, the modern-day gold rush of tourists mirroring the old gold rush itself.
Rees was the first to farm the Queenstown area and build houses on the lakefront. It would have taken unimaginable grit to get stock into that location let alone establish a farm once they were there. He brought a boat to the lake that was used to ferry supplies and stock across.
Within a couple of years, gold was discovered nearby in Arrowtown, and the government bought out the Rees farm for $10,000 pounds. In today’s money, that would be about $3m NZD. Probably not a great deal, given the amount of gold that was pouring out of the valley.
In their rush to get to the gold, miners did not realise that food sources were scarce. Rees fed them off the farm and saved many of them from starvation. The legend is that the miners were so hungry that as Rees doled out rations, he had to hold a gun on them.
Rees relocated the farm to Kawarau Falls, near where the airport is today.
Evidence of Maori has been found dating back 700 years in the area, but apparently, there were little or no settlements, and the land was used as a summer hunting ground, where Moa was in abundance, as was Pounamu (Greenstone), which is still highly valued today.
There are very few Kiwis in Queenstown; I think we met three. The locals seem to hide from the town itself (wise.) A lot of them have zero spatial awareness, always bumping into us and each other as they wander around, possibly because most of them come from parts of the world where they drive on the wrong side of the road.
After being rural for so long, being suddenly close to so many people was a weird feeling. Rural is sparse; once you get out of Queenstown, it’s the same. It wasn’t the only weird feeling.
At the hotel, you had to walk down a couple of flights of stairs to get out on the balcony, our pre-loading spot. The first time, we looked at each other, looked at the stairs, and back at each other again. It just felt really weird going up and down the stairs, and then we figured it out.
We hadn’t been on any more than two stairs in the last four years. We’d literally started to forget how to use more than two stairs. It was like sea legs for those of you who have been on a boat for a long period of time. When you get off the boat, the ground feels slightly unstable. We found our stair legs after a few drinks, thankfully.
The hotel bar provided a source of entertainment between 5 and 6 pm, happy hour. Not that happy for many people as the wait for drink time was long due to only one bar person on duty. The trick was to buy an entire bottle of wine or four beers at once and avoid the cocktails that seemed to take half an hour to make.
Australian tourists were ever unfiltered, “I’ll just go and have a pee, love, while you make me cocktail!” This would garner stern looks from the older English people, who sat down in the same seats each day and had the same conversations each day, over gin of course.
Groups of young Americans came and went, Kardashian style, spending far more time taking selfies of themselves than actually drinking. The girls looked like they had applied makeup using a car painter, and the boys dressed like mountain climbers in an effort to impress.
K and I seemed to be invisible when it came to the Japanese. They were constantly walking into us and would dart around me while I waited at the bar. Now, most of you know that I am tall and broad (and wide); I am hard to miss, so I consider this my new superpower. Being Invisible to Japanese People. I have no idea if this superpower has any practical application.
A group of English girls poured out onto the viewing deck one afternoon, massive Derry Girls with accents almost impossible to understand. They all squeezed onto a small swing seat, commenting on the size of each other’s arses. I had money on the entire thing collapsing, but it was obviously built to last.
The older Americans talked loudly about everything; there were no secrets. Some were rude to staff, and one suggested that he could just buy the whole bar. They loudly talked about making imaginary movies, name-dropped, declared themselves lovers of Trump (of course they were), and fell over quite fast as New Zealand craft beer is strong and American beer is for children.
In town at night, there was quite an underbelly if you looked for it, par for the course in any tourist town. Old lechers leching, drug deals being done, undercurrents of aggression in places, police cars on the move, menacing bouncers, and dangerous gaggles of girls on hen’s night (the most dangerous thing ever.)
The best thing to do in Queenstown is get out into the surrounding country. It’s wild. Glenorchy, also known as the top of the lake (and made famous by the TV series of the same name directed by Jane Campion), was a pleasant relief from the town.
Glenorchy feels like one of the remotest places in New Zealand, a gateway into the mountains themselves, real mountains. The scenery is even more stunning than Queenstown itself, and a lot of movies have been shot up there, including that one by Peter Jackson.
The local bar is a mixture of locals and tourists, along with a movie maker complaining about the regional council charging him $640 for a bore inspection that only took a few minutes. It seems that it’s not just the towns that are expensive.
In Arrowtown, we found an older man who made miniature houses, stables, farms, and other models from stone. Literally cutting and hand-making them the same way that the original stone masonry was done. He tried to sell us many houses and things, and K bought the stables you see above.
Arrowtown is beautiful but also another tourist spot; all the old stone shops are filled with tourist gift shops. It was a still, hot day when we visited, and I could imagine miners panning for gold in the river just a short walk from the town centre.
Well, readers, it is nearly the end of the year and Christmas. Enjoy your break, and stay safe. Be fat and happy.