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HERE’s my story of a real life Christmas in New Zealand, 2018, just to show you what it is like in the land of reversed seasons.
Well actually, they aren’t completely reversed. Here’s snow falling outside my window in Queenstown a month before Christmas. A guest quipped that it was “the first snow of summer.”
It had warmed up by Christmas Day but my British friend Sarah, visiting with her mum, is still keeping her puffer jacket on.
Queenstown is two hours south of Auckland by jet, two hours that make a difference. Auckland has palm trees and looks like Fiji. Queenstown looks more like Norway.
Queenstown is on a really long lake called Lake Wakatipu, which stretches 80 km or 50 miles from Kingston at one end to Glenorchy and Kinloch at the other. Queenstown is part-way between.
In the old days, Lake Wakatipu was a sort of watery highway, with a fleet of four lake steamers based in Queenstown, part-way along the lake.
The lake steamers met trains from the outside world at Kingston, and delivered their passengers and goods to communities along the lake as far as Glenorchy and Kinloch. (They’re big on Scottish names in this part of New Zealand, which looks like the Highlands as much as it does Norway, and was settled by Scots.)
Queenstown didn’t have road access from Kingston until the 1930s, though there were rough tracks leading eastward out of Queenstown before that, such as the terrifying Skippers Canyon Road. Glenorchy and Kinloch didn’t get a road from Queenstown until 1962.
One of the most unique attractions in today’s Queenstown is the 1912-vintage Earnslaw. The Earnslaw is the last working coal-fired steamer in the Southern Hemisphere, sole survivor of the old Queenstown fleet
Heading eastward from Queenstown, on roads now improved into major highways apart from the Skippers, you get to a desert-like region called Central Otago. Otago is the bottom third, or so, of New Zealand’s South Island.
Central Otago is a rain-shadow region, kept dry by the blocking effect of the high mountains around Queenstown. It looks a lot like Outback Australia or parts of the Middle East that I’ve been to. Some call it a desert, though there are a few too many trees and shrubs for that to be literally true.
They call South Africa a world in one country, and this is true of New Zealand as well. Some bits of New Zealand look like Norway, and other bits look like Fiji. And there are bits that look like the Outback or the Middle East too. Probably nowhere could you say that ‘this is typical New Zealand’!
Central Otago begins just a few kilometres outside Queenstown, in the extra-picturesque little mining settlement of Arrowtown, depicted on calendars and postcards and boxes of chocolates for decades past.
Though the average year-round temperature isn’t high in Otago as compared to OUtback Australia or the Middle East, it gets pretty hot under a blue summer sky in Central all the same — and in Queenstown too, once it has been summer for a while.
Otago towns are mostly quite historic by New Zealand standards, with whole streets of stone buildings erected in the 1860s and 1870s for want of timber; buildings that nobody has ever had the heart to demolish. Such towns are open-air museums of the early settler’s way of life.
The mainstay of Central, as it’s generally known, was for a long time a mixture of gold mining and sheep farming. Nowadays, the main activity probably consists of the growing of wine grapes and other sorts of fruit with the aid of irrigation, plus tourism. The New Zealand actor Sam Neill, of Jurassic Park fame, has a vineyard round here.
Throughout Otago, Scottish names are at least as common as the alternatives. For every Arrowtown there’s a Bannockburn, for every Lawrence, a Lauder. Māori names, so common in the more hospitable parts of New Zealand, are less common in Otago and particularly so in Central.
I spent a day in Central a few weeks before Christmas, as I had to go to a town with the stern name of Cromwell in order to pick up an outdoor table I’d bought. Cromwell was partly submerged for a combination hydro-electricity and irrigation scheme in the 1980s. Fortunately, the picturesque old part was saved, and some new suburbs were built on higher ground as well.
See what I mean about a complete time-capsule of the 1870s!
On Boxing Day, my editor Chris Harris and I decided to head to Paradise: literally, with a capital P, namesake of the California town lately destroyed by wildfires. The area around Glenorchy and on to Paradise is the setting of the British TV drama Top of the Lake. Many locals thought the series was too Deliverance-like, even though the director, Jane Campion, is a New Zealander herself.
The Glenorchy-to-Paradise road leads into a valley very much like the Yosemite Valley in California. A flat valley floor is hemmed in by impressive, steep-sided mountains. There would be hundreds of people up the Paradise Valley every day if it were as easy to get to or handy to big cities as Yosemite; but of course it isn’t.
There is some tourism, though. The valley sports a huge rambling wooden guesthouse called Arcadia, or Paradise House, a surprising sight in what is increasingly a real wilderness as you keep heading away from the lake. Also, one end of a a back-country trail of major importance, the Rees-Dart Track, comes out into the Paradise Valley.
I said that Paradise was hard to get to (no pun intended!) There is a gravel road, but for some reason it is poorly engineered and has many fords with deep, un-drained standing water in them even in dry weather. A sign warns would-be motorists to turn back unless they have a suitable vehicle.
We parked up at the beginning of the Rees-Dart track and walked along it for a way, up and over the nose of a vertical-sided outcrop called Chinaman’s Bluff, after the Chinese miners who used to work in the area. That’s another California parallel, I guess. The vertical cliffs were carved by a glacier that used to run down the valley, and subsequent flows of gravel created the valley’s flat bottom. A bigger, downstream glacier carved Lake Wakatipu.
Penned on New Year’s Eve, 2018. For more, see my website:
a-maverick.com.
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