Queenstown, New Zealand · Oceania

5 ideal things to do in Queenstown

The short list, pulled out of the long essay. No opening hours, because they change and I would only get them wrong — just what is worth your morning, roughly when to turn up, and where I have wasted time so you don’t have to.

By Ščenza

Last checked October 12, 2025

1. 01

   TSS Earnslaw to Walter Peak

   Steamer Wharf, Lake Wakatipu·Year-round; better on a cold clear day

   Launched in 1912 and still burning coal — the last commercial passenger steamship of her kind in the southern hemisphere. You can stand at the rail above the engine room and watch two men shovel, and that, not the sheepdog demonstration at the far end, is the actual attraction. She came out of a full hull and engine overhaul in 2025, so she has years in her yet. Forty minutes each way across water the colour of old bottle glass.

2. 02

   Kawarau Bridge, where commercial bungy began

   Kawarau Gorge, east on the road towards Cromwell·Mornings; the platform queue builds through the day

   Gold-fields suspension bridge from 1880, forty-three metres above green water, and the spot where AJ Hackett turned a Vanuatu land-diving ritual into an industry in the late 1980s. You can watch from the viewing deck without jumping, and honestly the watching is better — the conversation between a nervous person and a very calm employee on that platform is the whole human condition compressed into ninety seconds. I jumped once, in my twenties, and felt no need to establish a pattern.

3. 03

   Milford Sound / Piopiotahi as a long day

   Nearly 300 km each way, about four hours' drive via Te Anau·Go on a wet day — most of the waterfalls only exist when it rains

   It is a fiord, not a sound, misnamed by somebody who did not check, and Mitre Peak comes almost seventeen hundred metres straight out of the water. Six metres of rain fall here in a year, so stop hoping for sunshine and go when it is pouring, when a thousand temporary waterfalls appear down the cliffs. Break the drive at The Divide and take the Key Summit detour off the Routeburn: a steep climb to a bush-line plateau just over nine hundred metres, and the best hour of that whole road.

4. 04

   Arrowtown and the Chinese settlement

   Twenty kilometres from Queenstown, up the Arrow River·April, for the poplars and the autumn festival

   Everybody comes for the restored gold-rush main street. The part that stays with you is down on Bush Creek: the huts of Chinese miners who arrived in the 1870s and were pushed to live apart from the town, with Ah Lum's store still standing among them. They are tiny, stone, half dug into the bank. Walk that first and the main street reads completely differently afterwards. In April the valley goes yellow and the town becomes unrecognisably busy for a fortnight.

5. 05

   The road to Glenorchy

   Along the western shore to the head of Lake Wakatipu·Early morning, ahead of the tour vans

   Forty-odd minutes of lakeside road with nowhere flat to stand and roughly eight places you will stop anyway. At the head of the lake the country opens into the Dart and Rees valleys, flat braided riverbeds under mountains that go straight up, and the scale takes a while to arrive because there is nothing familiar in the frame to measure it against. This is the drive people mean when they say the South Island. Fill the tank in Queenstown; Glenorchy is small and honest about it.