Year 13 Geography Trip

On Monday the fifth of August, the two year thirteen geography classes embarked on a three day trip to learn about the process of tourism development in the Queenstown area first hand.

By Charles Ross

Upon arriving in the town we went straight from bus to boat as we boarded the ‘Earnslaw’ – a wonderful old steamship originally built in Dunedin before it was cut up, train-transported, and reassembled to cart passengers and livestock the length of the pounamu-coloured lake. Some of us watched the shovelling of coal down in the bottom of the boat while others participated in an impromptu karaoke session. We next had the opportunity to wander around the town centre, in search of food and to ogle at jumped-up price tags (even within the seemingly humble Four-Square) and at designer brand stores – jammed like grotesque gemstones into the rougher – and oddly more familiar – historic shop-fronts.

The next morning we headed to Arrowtown, where many a warm takeaway coffee was clutched by freezing hands in that beautiful little icebox of a town. We received two excellent and intensive presentations from the local museum and the Department of Conservation – first mapping the almost alarming rate at which the tourism industry has explored and exploited the Queenstown area (from the Earnslaw’s first voyage in 1912, all through the ski field, jet boating, and bungee jumping chaos of the years, and up to the present day in which Queenstown is known as the ‘adventure capital of the world’), and then being informed on the methods DOC uses to regulate all this activity with the goal of preserving the natural environment that makes it all viable in the first place. That afternoon, a few of us walked around the edge of the lake while others holed-up with knitting and crochet projects – these coming into being at unbelievable speeds reminiscent of the rapid growth and expansion of the buildings and infrastructure all around us.

We had another informative presentation from Destination Queenstown about their efforts to promote and regulate tourism in the area on the Wednesday before taking the Pig Route home, and being allowed a ONE MINUTE stop for a hurried snowball fight. It was an all round useful and entertaining trip, despite its inevitable end in which we left behind the mountain-cast shadows of the Remarkables and returned to face the looming darkness of our mock exams…