The Qeenstown area was the site of a gold rush in the 1860s, gold fever being centred on Arrowtown, a few miles away. The town is now very small, but the centre is well preserved as a historic area, the main street lined with late nineteenth century buildings and the Chinese miners’ settlement preserved five minutes walk away from the centre. We drove over there on Tuesday, aboard the Arrowtown bus, took a leisurely stroll along the main street, then took the Tobin track up into the hills above the town. It was a fairly easy walk, climbing steadily for about an hour to a lookout point. From there, the walking track carries on into the mountains, but we stopped for the magnificent views of the mountains and the valley, looking over Arrowtown to Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu in the distance. The mountains give textbook examples of glacial valleys, scoured by ice, with clear bergschrund sites – all that geography coming back after all those years!
And there at the lookout, as if they knew I was coming, was Noel’s Seat!
After descending we wandered up the Arrow River back into the town, and took a quick tour around the Chinese miners’ settlement, with their tiny rough houses where they lived frugally so that they could send their earnings back to China. Single rooms with rough stone walls and roofed in tin, they cannot have been comfortable places to live, particularly in the freezing winters. Some were just walling off small caves in the cliff face.
Late in the afternoon, it was time to catch the bus again and return to Queenstown and back to the motel.
