Queenstown

The thing I desperately needed after Sydney – what everyone desperately needed, as they flew off to beaches and retreats all around the region that week – was rest, and Queenstown was to provide at least some of that. I was met by Jan, the owner of what can loosely be termed a “bed and breakfast” in which I was staying – loosely because, although they provided me with a bed and with breakfast, she and her husband Martin also provided me with afternoon drinks, rides into town, pleasant company and one of the best views that I have ever enjoyed. The weather was gorgeous if somewhat chilly, with not a cloud in the sky and the view over Lake Wakatipu, toward the Remarkables mountain range, completely unobstructed. Queenstown being the self-proclaimed “world capital of adventure”, I promptly booked myself in for a sky-dive from 12,000 feet the next morning and went for dinner (good, though from a distance of two weeks, unremarkable).
The next morning was miserable and my freefall-in-the-sky was first postponed and then canceled altogether. I spent most of the day dozing and looking at the view, still majestic (more majestic?) because of the now omnipresent clouds. I also managed to get myself a table at a restaurant that had been recommended to me by Fabian in Sydney (“it's got a weight on the back of the door, that goes up and down as the door opens and closes” was how he described it, and I now know exactly what he meant). The highlight of the meal was the slow-cooked lamb, which was perfectly done and indecently good – indecent both because there sometimes remains, even in an atheist, a residual feeling that Something This Good Must Be Bad, and because the meat fell away from the bone of the shank so easily as to suggest nothing so much as a coital, rather than anatomical, connection between the two – certainly more than “just good friends”, but perhaps not quite “married couple”. Whether because of this image, or its own melt-in-the-mouth virtues, it was sublime. As so often in such cases, the restaurant went on to completely fuck it up by serving cheese that would have been mediocre had it not been seemingly kept in a freezer prior to meeting me – little squares of frigid pasteurised plastic that might as well have been the prophylactic remains of the sensuous lamb coupling of the course before.
There is a choice that all first-time visitors to Queenstown must make: visit Milford Sound or Doubtful Sound? Most choose the former, though I am not sure why: the latter has by far the better name (though its origins are dull: Captain Cook thought it doubtful that if he sailed down it, he would manage to sail back out to sea. Before I found this out, I had images of sailors long-dead making doubtful sounds there – but then, I always do), is more interesting to get to (coach, then boat, then coach, then boat – rather than coach/boat for Milford) and may be, by some accounts, more beautiful. One also gets to visit the largest power station in New Zealand, which was far more fun than it sounds.
Doubtful Sound itself is actually a fjord, left as a majestic scratch on the landscape by the glaciers of the last ice-age and now a beautiful and deserted boat-ride for awed tourists, sheer (yet lush green) valley sides rising up on either side of the water, dolphins swimming alongside the boat (although New Zealand has only two types of native(ish) land-mammal (the short-tailed and the long-tailed bat), having broken away from the rest of the Pangaean landmass before mammals evolved, it has a number of marine mammals to keep it company) and seals resting lazily on rocks just out to sea, taunting Canadian tourists by being just out of reach. It was a great way to spend a day, all in all – the sort of passive tourism that requires no real effort or expending of calories, and yet makes one feel worthy for having done something – and Something Big, at that – with one's day.