Lake Wakatipu

Lake Wakatipu fills a trough that a glacier gouged into the mountains of Central Otago during the last ice age, and it still has the shape of something carved rather than poured: a long, narrow body of water bent twice into a dog leg, 80 kilometres from end to end. That makes it New Zealand's longest lake, and with an area of about 295 square kilometres, its third largest. The surface lies 309 metres above sea level, yet the deepest point is 420 metres down, so the floor of the lake sits more than a hundred metres below the level of the sea. The water, fed by snow and glacier melt through the Dart and Rees rivers at its head, is exceptionally clear and cold, and drains out through the Kawarau River near Frankton.

The lake breathes. A seiche, a slow standing wave, makes the water at Queenstown Bay rise and fall by about 20 centimetres in a cycle of roughly 27 minutes. Māori tradition gives the lake the name Whakatipu Waimāori, and one interpretation of the name refers to a giant who lies beneath the water, his heartbeat or breath moving the lake. The legend holds that the giant was burned where he slept, and that the lake fills the hollow his body left behind, which is why its outline resembles a figure with knees drawn up.

What makes Wakatipu one of the great lake landscapes of the world is the frame. The jagged wall of the Remarkables rises straight from the eastern shore, and further up the lake the mountains close in until, around Glenorchy, the view opens on the high peaks and beech forests of the Southern Alps. Queenstown sits on its northern arm, Kingston at its southern tip, and between them there is very little but water and rock. At the southern end, the old river bed that once drained the lake towards the Mataura, until a glacial moraine blocked it about 18,000 years ago, now carries the route of the historic Kingston Flyer railway.

For more than a century the lake has had its own resident vessel. The TSS Earnslaw, a twin-screw coal-fired steamer built in Dunedin and launched in 1912, still crosses from Queenstown to Walter Peak on the far shore. It is the largest steamship ever built in New Zealand and the last commercial coal-fired passenger steamer in the Southern Hemisphere, and watching the stokers at work below deck while the Remarkables slide past is part of the experience.

Getting there

Queenstown, on the northern shore, is the natural base; Invercargill, the nearest larger city on the south coast, is about 150 km away. Queenstown Airport (ZQN), at Frankton on the lake's edge, is about 16 km from the centre of the lake. Roads follow the shore from Queenstown to Glenorchy at the head of the lake and south to Kingston, and the TSS Earnslaw sails from Queenstown to Walter Peak.