Book Queenstown tours & attraction tickets

Few towns anywhere in the world have staked their identity so completely on the vertical. Queenstown sits at the edge of Lake Wakatipu in the Otago region of New Zealand's South Island, ringed by the Remarkables mountain range to the south-east and the Cecil Peak and Walter Peak massifs across the water to the west. The lake itself is one of the country's largest, shaped by glacial action into a long, narrow Z, and the town occupies a small peninsula where the Shotover River meets the lake's northern arm. That geography is not incidental to what Queenstown has become; it is the whole explanation.

The town centre is compact enough to walk in an afternoon, with the waterfront promenade and Steamer Wharf acting as a natural gathering point. From the wharf, the TSS Earnslaw, a twin-screw steamship launched in 1912 and still coal-fired, makes regular crossings to Walter Peak Station on the western shore. Several of the experiences available through tickadoo are built around this vessel, including a farm tour at Walter Peak and a garden-to-table dining experience that pairs the crossing with a meal prepared from produce grown on the station itself. The Earnslaw is not a heritage novelty; it is a working part of how people move across the lake, and its continued operation says something about the town's relationship with its own past.