We booked into Rydges Hotel in Queenstown✲, New Zealand’s capital of adventure tourism. Whitewater rafting, bungy jumping and Jet Shotovers beckoned, but as our hotel was handily situated in proximity to the wharf on picture perfect Lake Wakatipu, something more sedate – a leisurely boat trip across its glistening waters – was what took our immediate fancy.
From the Queenstown wharf we caught the vintage twin screw steamboat TSS Earnslaw❁…the journey was a complete step back in time…a slow and leisurely ride across Lake Wakatipu with the boat chugging along at a 1924 pace. No one on board much minded the pedestrian progress we were making. The only downside to the trip was trying to avoid inhaling the vessel’s toxic nasties, trying to survive the vile fumes of black smoke emitted from the steamer’s coal-fired boilers pervading the air inside the Earnslaw.
Once at Walter Peak High Country, we were immediately taken on a guided tour of the working farm. We got up close with the farm’s various livestock – Scottish Highland cattle, red deer, lambs and some adaptable llamas. My favourite critters on the farm were the “hairy coos” as they are called in Scotland. These Erse ‘Heilan’ cows, sandy-golden-tan in colour and rather soporific in nature, were a delight with their full coats of shaggy hair endearingly covering their eyes.
My highest highlight of the tour however was the demonstration of rounding up and penning a drove of sheep. This was made memorable by the antics of the leathery-faced old shepherd guy and his “Abbott and animal Costello” routine with the farm’s working border collie. The old farmer was a real joker, entertaining us with his dry commentary which bore more than a touch of the John Clarke quippery – and the same flat deadpan delivery. To start the show, he barked out instructions to the collie to tear madly all over the top paddock fetching the grazing sheep. After terrorising and cajoling the sheep into one cowering bunch, the dog efficiently corralled them into the enclosure at the south end. Then, with mission accomplished, the farmer, with comic timing and mock annoyance, remarked of the still heavily panting dog, “I don’t know why he’s so tired! I’m the one who does all the work”!
The one-liners didn’t stop when the farmer donned his “shearing kit”, the blue and red overalls of his defleecing trade, to do some serious bladework. With a couple of hand-picked Romneys, he demonstrated (with accompanying audio) how to give a sheep the “Full Monty” crew cut! I’m not sure if the sizeable cohort of Japanese tourists on hand were sufficiently au fait with ‘Kiwised’ English to get the gist of the demonstrator’s jokey spiel and all the nuances of his wry humorous asides, but they generally seemed to sense the comic implications of the situation and enthusiastically laughed accordingly.
The other stand-out feature of the visit, the afternoon tea, was held in the Colonel’s Homestead, an elegant turreted terracotta red and white building set against the impressive backdrop of the towering Walter Peak. The high tea worked a treat with very generous servings of scones and pikelets and the obligatory jam and cream, all washed down with a nice cuppa. Afterwards, a leisurely lakeside stroll through the homestead’s très picturesque English-style gardens set the seal on a great day’s outing.
Time passed at the right pace on the return journey in the Earnslaw to Rydges – the tour operator organised a traditional sing-a-long to the accompaniment of the boat’s period-piece piano. We were given a complimentary “NZ Song Book” and encouraged to join in. The songs were every bit as vintage as the 1912 vessel and only a bit cringeworthy, but hey it was all part of setting an authentic mood for a momentary step back into yesteryear.
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✲ Kiwi anecdote # 579 – No double entendres please, we’re New Zealanders! The Queenstown Rydges’ street entrance unusually is on the building’s fourth floor, owing to a bit of a ridge in the landscape where it was built. Our room was on the sixth floor. Returning to the hotel on the first night of our stay, I decided to walk up the stairs (only two flights) to our floor. Perplexingly though when I reached the top of the stairs on the fifth floor, I couldn’t see the staircase which led to the next floor, our floor! It was not where it should (logically) have been. I scouted around level 6 for a bit but weirdly the staircase couldn’t be sighted. So, puzzled, I went back to the fourth floor to ask reception. The attractive young Pakeha woman on duty responded to my query in a slightly patronising tone reserved I imagine for the utterly clueless…she said to me firmly: “Sir-r-r, we are a very normal hotel in Queenstown, we always have sux here between five and seven”. Realising that the immediate implication I had drawn from what she had said, had not for one scintilla dawned on her, I was sorely tempted but managed to restrain myself from replying, thanks very much for telling me when, all that’s missing now is where! Ba-boom!
❁ the Earnslaw briefly popped up in the movie Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) as an Amazon River boat(sic)
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