Knowing Where

We check on my father-in-law’s headstone. It’s harder and harder to find a park close these days, but we somehow manage, sneaking our car past four-wheel drives, new cars, trucks, buses and car parks reserved for the mini golf place – surprisingly still there not having been swallowed up by developers.

We wipe the shiny, dark marble, clearing it of dust from the construction work opposite – a new hotel complex (no surprises there). We water the tussock plant. We take a moment. Memories crowd in.

This is another visit to Robert’s old home town, much-changed since the 1950’s, 1960’s, 1970’s, 1980’s …

We search for the byways and quiet places that no-one else knows (or wants) to look for. When we find one, I give a nod to the Three Sisters peak – part of the Kawarau / Remarkables family of outcrops and scarps. Free of snow, they are rocking it in their summer gear.

We have parked ourselves beside Whakatipu Waimāori in a spot where there are no people except for those who just walk on by.

In deference to the scorn that a lot of New Zealanders (in my experience, usually Mainlanders) pour on this town – a town that has been turned into a resort overwhelmed by tourism, I tweet: ‘It might be Queenstown but it’s our Queenstown’.

We watch a family of scaup – a mother scaup and her three ducklings –

the ducklings learning to dive.

~*~

Next stop, Arrowtown.

Arrowtown is a quaint town (also to a large degree overwhelmed by tourism) with a history of gold mining and cheek-to-cheek cute stone cottage cafes and shops selling expensive stuff to visitors and tourists.

But it has a river.

We opt to buy beer and crisps and to find a place to sit in the shade by the river Arrow

where lupins catch the sunlight and upstream, a young couple pan for gold.

~*~

We return to Tāhuna / Queenstown . We’ve booked to stay for two nights. Downtown the noise and crowds are both inevitable and inescapable. We settle a while beside a raucous cafe with a singer full of quips and requests for popular Elton John songs.