Four days in Queenstown: the town that turned fear into an industry

Get above the town on the first afternoon. The gondola starts a few streets back from the waterfront and climbs Bob's Peak steeply enough that the cars feel briefly wrong, and the platform at the top looks across the whole basin: Coronet Peak to the north, the Remarkables to the east, and Lake Wakatipu running out of sight to the south west between the mountains. If you are fit and want to save the fare, the Tiki Trail zigzags up through the pines beside it in about an hour and a half of hard work.

There is a luge track at the top, which is more fun than it has any right to be, and a viewing deck that is the best place in town at sunset.

Come down and walk out into the gardens on the peninsula. Queenstown Gardens occupy a spit of land jutting into the lake, planted with enormous exotic conifers a century ago, with a pond, a frisbee golf course and a shingle beach where the water is snowmelt cold and people swim anyway.

Then join the queue for the burger. Everybody does it once.

This is a twelve hour day and it is worth every hour. Milford Sound is about three hundred kilometres from Queenstown by road, four hours each way, and the drive is a large part of the experience: down the length of Lake Wakatipu, across the tussock of the Te Anau basin, then up a glacial valley of beech forest and waterfalls to a tunnel bored straight through the mountains, with a steep descent on the far side.

Take a coach unless you are confident. The road is single lane in places, it closes for avalanche risk, and there is no fuel for the last hundred and twenty kilometres. Coaches also stop at the mirror lakes and the Chasm on the way, which self drivers usually skip because they are chasing a boat departure.

The sound itself is a fiord, carved by ice and drowned by the sea, with walls rising over a kilometre straight out of the water. Mitre Peak, the one on every poster, is 1,692 metres and stands almost directly out of the sea. The cruise runs out towards the Tasman and back in about ninety minutes.

It rains here about two hundred days a year, and the wet ones are better: hundreds of temporary waterfalls appear down the rock faces within minutes of a downpour. Two of the permanent falls run whatever the weather, and the boats nose right in under one of them, which soaks the front deck and is the moment everybody remembers.

Twenty minutes east of town, on the old road to Cromwell, the Kawarau river runs through a gorge crossed by an 1880 suspension bridge. In 1988 two New Zealanders started charging people to jump off it, which is where the whole industry begins, and it has run continuously since. The drop is forty three metres, it is the only jump here that will take two people at once, and the platform out over the water is free to walk onto whether or not you intend to jump. Watching is a legitimate way to spend an hour.

The road continues into Gibbston, a valley of pinot noir vineyards with cellar doors along it, and a cycle trail that runs from the bridge through the vines.

Then turn north to Arrowtown. Gold was found in the Arrow river in 1862 and the town that went up around it is still there: a main street of low wooden and stone shopfronts under enormous sycamores and poplars, which is why the place is mobbed for three weeks every autumn.

At the western end, past the last shops, is the Chinese settlement. Several hundred Chinese miners worked these claims from the 1860s, mostly on ground the Europeans had already abandoned, and they lived apart under a good deal of official hostility. What survives is a scatter of tiny stone and corrugated iron dwellings beside the water, restored and left open, with a store rebuilt on its foundations. It takes twenty minutes and it is the most affecting thing in the district.

The jetboat is the Queenstown thing that is worth doing even if the bungy is not. The Shotover river runs through a narrow rock canyon a few kilometres from town, and the boats were designed for exactly this: flat bottomed, jet driven, drawing about ten centimetres of water, and able to run at speed within a metre of a cliff face. The trip takes about half an hour, includes several full spins, and involves rather more rock than most people expect.

It runs from Arthurs Point, a few minutes out of town, with a shuttle laid on, and the first boats go early enough to fit before a lunchtime flight.

If you would rather end quietly, the bird park in the gardens is the alternative: a small sanctuary of native species with kiwi in a nocturnal house and conservation shows through the day. It is a short walk from the mall.

The airport is a ten minute drive from anywhere in town, which is the one convenient thing about Queenstown.