Fiordland Roads of Water

Queenstown, gold gullies, lake roads, and the long green road to Milford

Six places strung between Queenstown and the Tasman coast: the gold town that reinvented itself as the adventure capital of the world, the 80-kilometre lake whose seiche the Maori call a giant's heartbeat, the schist huts where Chinese miners lived and mostly died far from home, the Depression-era road blasted through the Darran Mountains by pick and shovel, the fiord Captain Cook was too afraid to enter, and the largest national park in New Zealand where a bird declared extinct was found still living.

Itinerary

1. Queenstown — A remote gold-mining settlement on Lake Wakatipu turned itself into New Zealand's adventure capital -- nearly two million visitors a year for a town of barely 15,000. In November 1988, A.J. Hackett threw himself off the Kawarau Bridge on an elastic cord and invented commercial bungee jumping; Shotover jet boats have spun through canyon walls at 85 km/h since 1965. The Remarkables loom across the lake, running improbably north-south.
2. Lake Wakatipu — Every twenty-seven minutes the water in Queenstown Bay rises about twenty centimetres, then falls -- a seiche that the Maori explain as the heartbeat of the giant Matau, burned in the trench his body carved. New Zealand's longest lake at 80 kilometres, it runs in a reversed-N dog-leg and plunges 420 metres deep, its floor 111 metres below sea level. The TSS Earnslaw, a coal-fired steamer from 1912, still crosses it -- the last of her kind in the Southern Hemisphere.
3. Arrowtown Chinese Settlement — Of 5,004 Chinese people in the 1881 Otago census, only nine were women. Along Bush Creek, miners invited from Australia's exhausted fields to rework the tailings Europeans had abandoned built huts into the schist cliffs, tended gardens, and ran a store that doubled as a bank. Most grew old here and died without going home; in 1902 a ship carrying nearly 500 exhumed bodies back to China sank off Hokianga.
4. Milford Road — Five men with picks and wheelbarrows started it in 1935, hammering into the granite of the Darran Mountains during the Depression. Three workers died in avalanches before the Homer Tunnel was pierced in 1940 and opened in 1953. State Highway 94 runs 119 kilometres from Te Anau to Milford Sound, climbing faster than any highway in the country -- past the Eglinton Valley, the Mirror Lakes, and the 45th parallel before plunging into a 1.2-kilometre unlined bore that swallows light.
5. Milford Sound — Captain Cook sailed past in the 1770s and refused to enter, afraid the narrow walls would steal his wind. Milford Sound -- Piopiotahi, named for an extinct bird said to have flown here mourning the hero Maui -- takes 6,400 mm of rain a year, and after a downpour hundreds of temporary waterfalls appear on its cliffs. Mitre Peak rises 1,692 metres straight from the water, and a dark freshwater lens tricks deep-sea black coral into growing within reach of divers.
6. Fiordland National Park — In 1948 a doctor named Geoffrey Orbell walked into a remote valley and found the takahe -- a flightless bird science had declared extinct fifty years earlier, simply living where no one had looked. New Zealand's largest national park has just one road; supplies fly in to backcountry lodges and waste flies out. Glaciers drowned its valleys into fiords, Doubtful Sound stays roadless, and 8,000 mm of annual rain feeds waterfalls down near-vertical rock.