13-16 February 2025

Queenstown is a quite small, largely tourist city halfway up the biggest lake on the southern island, Lake Wakatipu. After checking into a very cute hotel perched up on a hill (the hills come quick in Queenstown), we immediately left and walked a few minutes to get massages, followed by dinner in Steamer’s Wharf, a collection of restaurants on the pier. 

The next morning we embarked on a full day trip out and back to Milford Sound in the Fjordlands National Park. That park, and the few other national parks in the area take up something like 17% of New Zealand’s land area and are larger than several of our largest US national parks combined. They are (intentionally) not particularly accessible in order to preserve native wildlife. While it would be a 30 minute helicopter or plane flight from Queenstown to Milford Sound (which does have a tiny airstrip for the purpose), it is a 4 hour drive.

That said, it is a beautiful drive through the mountains, valleys, and very very small towns that dot the way. We got to stop at several locations, and then spent a couple hours cruising on Milford Sound in weather that could not have been better.

The next day, we started off with the Skyline Queenstown experience, riding the southern hemisphere’s steepest gondola up Bob’s Peak in the Ben Lomond Scenic Reserve. If the name and photos of the area remind you of Scotland, it might interest you to know a lot of this area was settled initially by Scots that moved here for that reason.

Up on Bob’s Peak, we did a short hike on a circuit around the Skyline complex that included a view to Ben Lomond, which you can summit if you’re up for a 6+ hour hike and another 1000m of elevation gain from Bob’s Peak (already 400m above Queenstown). Skyline has a couple of luge tracks, which we tried out a few times and had a surprisingly fun time on. The views from up there were incredible.

In the evening, we cruised to dinner at Walter’s Peak Farm on the TSS Earnslaw, a 1912 Steamship still running on its original coal-fired steam engines. Until the 1960’s when more roads were finally build around the lake, it was used to ship supplies to some of the other smaller towns and settlements around the lake. Now you can ride either as a round trip cruise, or to Walter’s Peak farm for a BBQ dinner (delicious) and to see a demonstration of sheep shearing and sheep herding with one of their short-haired border collies (super cute). The farm has something like 20000 merino wool sheep, among other animals including some hairy coos. In the TSS Earnslaw, the engine room is open-roofed, I imagine to help keep cool but also to let you get a good look at what it takes to run the ship. It was very neat.

The last full day there started with a half day Lord of the Rings tour. We traveled the other direction along the lake from our first tour out past Glenorchy (the last town at the end of the lake, after which the roads stop being paved), stopping at sites where they filmed scenes for Amon Hen (specifically the Seat of Seeing where Frodo sees the Eye and Boromir tries to take the Ring from him), the area where Sam introduced Gollum to PO-TAY-TOES and where they stumbled upon the Oliphaunts, Isengard (from a vantage point of the location where they built Beorn’s home in The Hobbit), and Lothlorien. Our guide was a bit LOTR nerd so we got lots of neat tidbits about the filming and what went on at these location. Queenstown is also very much in the shadow of the mountain range known as the Remarkables, which the move crew dubbed “The Reusables”, because they used them as background in a number of different scenes. Other mountain ranges nearby included the set of peaks used for the Beacons of Gondor, and the glacier-capped Mount Earnslaw where the pass of Caradhras scene was filmed (where Frodo falls in the glacier and Boromir picks up the ring and hands it back after a tense moment). While Peter Jackson admitted he could’ve probably filmed that on a ski run, he helicoptered everyone onto the glacier, despite Sean Bean’s deathly fear of helicopters.

In the afternoon, we stopped at the Kiwi Bird Park where, among many other birds, we did get to see a few Kiwi Birds. They have a couple of Kiwi Huts that are plunged in darkness such that you actually do need to take a few minutes to acclimate before you can see anything (Kiwis are nocturnal).

They were larger than we expected, but very very cute nonetheless. We finished off our time in Queenstown with a lakeside dinner in more absolutely perfect weather. Queenstown is quite a gem that we would highly recommend if you have the chance.

We arrived in Wellington today after spending four nights in the absolutely beautiful and rugged Queenstown and the days are well(ington) and truly blurring now.