Lake Wakatipu Cruise to Walter Peak Farm

The TSS Earnslaw was launched at Kingston in 1912, the same year the Titanic went down, and she still burns coal — roughly a tonne of it an hour, shovelled by hand. Built in sections in Dunedin, carried inland by rail and riveted together on the lakeshore, the twin-screw steamer was commissioned to move sheep, mail, coal and settlers to high-country stations that no road reached. Walter Peak Station was one of them. The Lake Wakatipu Cruise to Walter Peak Farm is the direct descendant of that supply run. Hermann von Tunzelmann took up the run on the western shore in the early 1860s and named the mountain above it for his brother-in-law, Walter. The property later passed to the Mackenzie family and grew into one of the largest sheep stations in the Wakatipu basin, worked entirely by water. Wool bales went out by barge; stores came in the same way. The original homestead burned in the late 1970s, and the lakeside building that receives Lake Wakatipu Cruise to Walter Peak Farm tours today is a reconstruction in the same colonial-Victorian idiom, its garden planted to English lawn and copper beech. The steamer nearly ended as scrap. Withdrawn in the late 1960s, she was bought by Fiordland Travel — the company Les and Olive Hutchins founded in 1954, now RealNZ — and returned to service as a passenger vessel. That decision is why Lake Wakatipu Cruise to Walter Peak Farm tickets still involve an open furnace door rather than a diesel engine. The Earnslaw is the last coal-fired passenger steamship in commercial service in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Whakatipu steamship crossing she makes each day is unchanged in route, if not in cargo. Her engine room remains open to anyone who walks down the companionway. The lake beneath her is 291 metres deep at its deepest point, its floor lying well below sea level, and it bends through 80 kilometres in a long S between the Remarkables and Cecil Peak. The water rises and falls about twelve centimetres every twenty-seven minutes, a standing wave that Ngāi Tahu tradition reads as the heartbeat of Matau, a giant asleep beneath the surface. A Lake Wakatipu Cruise to Walter Peak Farm tour therefore crosses one of the strangest bodies of water in the country to reach one of its oldest working farms. Highland cattle, red deer and merino still run on the terraces, and the sheepdogs still work to whistle. Few Queenstown landmarks have changed so little.