Queenstown, done quietly
Figures out how to play in New Zealand’s playground when you’re pregnant (well, he wasn’t).
Steve Kilgallon
It was wet in Auckland and had seemed so for a very long time, and we had flammable airmiles burning a hole in our collective pocket. Offspring were threatening to emerge and curtail freedoms. 48 hours in Queenstown seemed a logical conclusion.
It remained wet in Auckland, but it was a bright spring day in Wakatipu and seemed to have been that way for quite some time.
Can’t say I’ve ever cared before about cars, but Thrifty had loaned us a 2016 Toyota Highlander, which turns out to be much, much nicer than my imported and dented Caldina, and had things like individual heating controls for each seat and a ride as soft as dog-paddling through a sea of melted toffee.
It bore us directly to the Queenstown Park Boutique Hotel, a 25-room place nestled between Queenstown Hill and the local rugby club.
We’d barely parked the wagon before the charming manager, Francisco, a Brazilian here some 14 years (so as local as you get in Queenstown terms), was greeting us and guiding us upstairs to a cleverly-appointed room.
It looked directly across to the hill itself, and every five minutes or so a paraglider would loom sharply into view then land in the school playing field across the road. Even the shower, with its long, vaulted skylight, offered a glimpse of the pine-covered pinnacle.
In daytime, it was a perfect, soporific location – at night, sleep proved cruelly fractured by the braying drunks wandering home along Robins Rd to the youth hostels.
The management know, and are considering converting the already double-glazed windows into triple-glazed.
A brisk jog around Queenstown Gardens and the Wakatipu foreshore first to generate the appetite for dinner (nobly passing up the hotel’s complimentary drinks and canapes in the lounge room) at No 5 Church Lane, a place that did an unusual take on mezze platters.
It aimed admirably high, and while it fell short of what it wanted to be, deserved applause for having a decent tilt at the whole thing, with dishes such as beetroot falafel and venison pate.
Food was important to us. The aforementioned impending progeny denied us the traditional Queenstown pursuits – no skiiing, mountainbiking, paragliding. Excessive time spent at wineries couldn’t be had for at least one of us, and thus by extension the other, being a considerate type. So it was a weekend re-cast on extreme leisure.
Breakfast then, was taken slowly, was cooked to order from a short but ample menu, as we snacked on hotcakes and croissants and fruit juice. The morning had dawned just as brightly, and we felt sustained enough to head to Lake Hayes, for a lap of the 8.2km crushed-gravel circuit of the lake itself. That brought us enticingly near the Amisfield winery, but minus the shower that would have made us presentable enough to turn up there.
Thus we had to settle for taking a couple of Devil Burgers (the queue, as is standard, was about 45 minutes for the legendary Ferg Burger, where I last managed to actually purchase anything in about 2007) down to the lakefront, watching local kids leap off the pontoon into Lake Wakatipu and then run, shivering, home.
Then to Arrowtown in the evening, for dinner in the Fork and Tap pub, a low-slung schistclad boozer at the far end of town with a distinctly British feel.
Everywhere else seemed deserted but half the town was inside this place.
The wait for the wild rabbit ravioli was worth it, and was eased by a couple of pints of local pale ale.
Our main destination for the evening – the elusive Amisfield booked out for the night – was the unique Dorothy Brown’s cinema, hidden up an iron staircase above a Mexican restaurant.
It had pink vaulted ceilings, a tiny bookshop, an intermission where you could buy cheeseboards and a full and enthusiastic house for, I’m sorry to say, Bridget Jones’s Baby.
On the final morning, we eschewed the traditional foray up Queenstown Hill on the gondola for a swift nine holes at the Frankton Golf Course, a short, very short, affair (the course record a measly 26) nestling up against the airport’s back fence, and offering unreasonably close encounters with some arriving aircraft.
The municipal golf course may not be among Queenstown’s shortlist of heart-rate-raising activities, but for our purposes, it did just fine.
The writer travelled on his own dime, but accommodation was provided by Queenstown Park Boutique Hotel, and transport by Thrifty Car Rental.