A town fit for a Queen and Adventure Junkies
Queenstown in November
Queenstown was the first place I was introduced to New Zealand a few years ago and it still gives me the feeling of exhilaration and adventure. Especially when flying in - the planes have to do quite a steep descent amid some impressive jagged mountain scenery that will make any LOR fan’s heart skip a beat. To any NZ newbie, Queenstown is the one-stop adventure and sight-seeing buffet.
Want some sights? There are at least four different ways to see Milford or Doubtful Sounds - take your pick of day trip, overnight on a boat, helicopter or plane. Want some adrenalin? How about being thrown off a cliff with a bungee cord? Or dropped for 3 terrifying seconds, followed by a swing over a river canyon? Or, a wild ride on a jet boat in said river canyon with a suicidal pilot whose mission is to make you scream. Have more money than time? Get whizzed up to a high altitude glacier in a helicopter for a scenic flight. There is also canyoning, white water rafting, biking around the lake, visiting farms, getting a boat ride on a historic steamship, wine tasting, stargazing with a telescope, mountain biking, hiking, rock climbing, taking a gondola, paragliding, skydiving, and also for a bit of money you can have that weird water jet engine thing strapped on your legs so you look like Robert Downey Jr in his Ironman costume, only without the red outfit.
The infamous Fergburger - be prepared to wait up to 1 hour in line
In other words, Queenstown is the mecca of NZ tourism. And in recent years, it’s inevitably become Tourist Central. Just as the adventure menu items abound, so do clueless tourists who line up for a 45 min queue at the Fergburger, storm the steam ship TSS Earnslaw as if in a siege worthy of a Mordor army and in general make both driving and crossing the streets in Queenstown a highly risky endeavor. Shuttles zip around the three little streets of the tiny lake-side town like busy bubble bees and traffic frequently jams to levels of San Francisco during a rush hour. Understandably, this also makes the locals (aka people living in Queenstown for longer than a few months) a bit touchy and irritable.
If you ever find yourself in Queenstown with not much to do (in my third visit to the town, I’ve just started to hit that point), I highly recommend picking up the local free newspaper and turning to page two. There you’ll find a contest for most “whingey” letter to the editor. “Whinge” is a New Zealand term for whining or complaining. There is usually a grand prize winner, followed by a few honorable mention letters. In the last edition I picked up the author was complaining about the 30 minute parking limit being dropped to 15 min so “tourists can drop off their rental skis”. The heart of the complaint was that ski season was long over but the time limit hadn’t been adjusted back to 30 min. Other complaint themes cluster around rents, foreigners buying up land and squeezing the locals out, and the cost of living in town. It sounds a bit like the San Francisco Bay Area and funnily the demographic that seems to be causing the problem is also similar. Both ride busses with a slight variation - in Queenstown they ride the big tour buses and in San Francisco the bus of choice is the tech commuter shuttle.
A techie from San Francisco running in Queenstown
Another techie spotted running! This one is originally from New Zealand though
On this part of our NZ trip, we’ve decided to do Queenstown on a budget. Which means we’ll be camping at the Holiday Park. There are two Holiday Parks, and in a typical Kiwi fashion of everything being small and accessible, they are as centrally located in Queenstown as any of the pricier hotel options. After a mad scramble, which involves Brent running between Holiday Parks to check out which sites are better, we settle on a little corner spot in the Creeksyde Holiday Park. It’s one of the few available spots where we can work around the ground covering that’s designed for RVs and Campervans, which constitute 95% of the clientele of the Holiday Parks. We are probably only one of 3 tents in the whole place.
Our camping spot in the Creeksyde Holiday Park visible from here (behind the small blue van with the open back door)
We like our spot - it’s close to the creek, offers us a bit of privacy, has a picnic table and is close to the main kitchen facility. And, just like in the Bay of Plenty, it has cute little ducks running around trying to see what they can scavenge off distracted campers’ plates. In the Bay of Plenty, we lost some cheese to birds by not covering the plate for 30 seconds. By the time we came back, the dish was transformed from “cheese and broccoli” to just "broccoli” and a particularly guilty-looking seagull sported a piece of cheese hanging from its beak. But we’ve been trained now by the master thieves, the Alpine kea parrots, so we won’t be committing that mistake again in the Creeksyde Holiday Park.
Our campsite with the ducks (Brent in the background getting water)
Who's da boss :)
We stay in Creeksyde for a total of 5 nights and quickly find that this is an unusual length of time for most people in the Park. Our neighbors change almost daily - there’s the German couple with the two young kids and the oversized camper van, there’s the French rock-climing couple that seems to go to bed late and wake up early and open and close their van door once very 30 minutes, and then there’s the Polish family who are spending the last night before they return their camper van next to us and transform their picnic table into an elaborate staging area for packing and repacking luggage. My favorite are the New Zealand Fire Fighters who move into the little motel rooms across from us with their wives for some weekend fire drill training -They are rowdy and funny and they constantly joke with each other and have a good time. Oh, and the lovely Tasmanian woman who has decided to take a year’s vacation with her son and travel the world together before he moves out of her house. She has a permanent smile and is full of funny and genuine stories from the Australian countryside.
Rather than annoy us, the hustle and bustle of the Holiday Park reminds of a beating heart. We find ourselves quickly falling into the daily rhythm of the campsite - people come and go, the kitchen goes through waves of smoking and steaming frenzy during dinner and lunch time (and 24/7 when one very large Chinese family practically moves in for a couple of days). We like our green space and the creekside and also enjoy the quirkiness of the Holiday Park. And there’s plenty of it!
We also discover the “adults-only ‘Lady in the bath’” lounge upstairs that has a bizarre collection of old grandma-style antique furniture, paintings of King George, the TSS Earnslaw steamship, and some very weird sculptures of a woman in a bathtub with plants growing in the tub and a few other oddities. But it’s sunny and quiet and we can charge our phones and computers and use the wifi there.
The famous "lady in the bath". Those are real plants growing under the tub glass btw
The quirky lounge in the Creeksyde Holiday Park
The Creeksyde also has a few private baths, one of which has a dry sauna which you can reserve for a small fee. I decide to do that one evening and I’m thankful that Brent plays along although I suspect that both of us know pretty well he’s not going to last long in a sauna. Five minutes in, I have the whole place to myself.
One of the touristy things we decide to do is take a ride on the TSS Earnslaw. It’s the oldest steamship in New Zealand (and maybe even in the Southern Hemisphere) and has always lived on lake Wakatipu in Queenstown. But the reason I’m interested in the ship is that Brent remembers being on it with his brother and parents as a young kid. We think it will be a lot of fun to take that boat again, decades later. Maybe Brent can remember something from that trip long ago? It’s also nice to take that trip on Waitangi day (New Zealand’s version of Independence Day), which sadly marks the anniversary of Brent’s dad’s passing many years ago.
We are running late, driving back from visiting a few wineries, so by the time we run to the ship dock, we’re some of the last people to board the Earnslaw. The place is absolutely packed - there’s no place to sit or even stand. Walking around, we find a small space near the windows by the bar and start enjoying our trip across the lake. It’s sunny and warm and we are having some cheese and wine on board, courtesy of some booking freebie. The atmosphere of the boat is very genuine. We visit the engine room which at one point has 5 guys doing all kinds of actions - shoveling coal into the fire pits, pulling knobs and levers. It’s hot and there’s a lot of noise and steam coming out. In the salon, an older looking man dressed in clothing from yesteryear is playing the piano. Except for the mobs of tourists, I feel like I’m in a Woodhouse novel and Bernie and Jeeves will appear around the corner any minute.
Brent at the TSS Earnslaw a few decades after his first visit
Piano man on board playing music from the 1930's
The steam engine room - coal is being shoveled into the furnace
Thankfully, by the time we dock, we realize most of the tourist horde is getting off the boat and into a lake-side restaurant. We breathe a sign of relief as we realize that a lot of Kiwis and a similar quantity of foreign tourists are getting off the boat for good, the Kiwis of course to have a Waitangi Day dinner with family. As we sail back 15 minutes later, we have the boat almost entirely to ourselves and we chat with a couple who split their time between England and Australia. The wife was a wine buyer so we share some impressions of our experience tasting wines around the Otago region.
As we approach the dock at Queenstown, I pause to admire this beautiful town set against the backdrop of the jagged Remarkables mountain range. Tourists, traffic and all, I still think Queenstown is gorgeous. A town truly fit for a Queen.
Two happy tourists in Queenstown
PS. Some tips: Go to Fergburger once or twice to get the experience and skip the lines next time in favor of Vudu Cafe. Also, if you’re feeling active, skip the gondola and instead hike up the hill for a wonderful view of Queenstown from the top. And don’t forget to visit Smallplanet Queenstown - arguably the best outdoor shop in New Zealand with a family feel. The guys there spent a lot of time explaining the intricacies of packs and other gear to us - they are really active skiers, mountaineers and trampers themselves and super passionate about the NZ outdoors. Plus they have a cute dog :)
The cute dog at the Small Planet store. The dressed up alien creature on the cover of the article is also from Small Planet.
