Adrian was somewhat fragile, having fought off the massed damsels of Arrowtown so I drove south to Manapouri past The Remarkables which are a very small but formidably dark and craggy mountain range, perfectly suited to the gateway to Mordor. On the way we gave the once-over to Queenstown, riding the Gondola for a bird’s-eye view of Lake Wakatipu.
The town itself is half backpack hostels and half active clothing shops, interspersed with carbo-food outlets and overlain with a pumped-up seaside town coating. It didn’t detain us very long. The route south is dominated by sheep farms, with a fair smattering of cattle and the occasional up-and-coming meat of choice, deer (venison on the hoof). Along the lakeshore is wild at the best of times, but today was blowing a north-easterly right down the valley, so by the time we reached Kingstown, the breakers on the beach were considerable. Although a tiny settlement, Kingston was the start of a railway line south. The LP advertises, as do brown info-signs, the Kingston Flyer, a steam train operating 16k to Fairlight and return. As we approached, the Auction sign did not bode well, and as we walked to the Café Bar, the sign was ominously switched from a welcoming OPEN to a CLOSED rebuttal. So was Adrian’s first chance to buy a full-size train set thwarted; locos, carriages, track, station and drivers’ thingummies thrown in. Manapouri is as far south and west as people and the road go.
There are three places to eat: one closes at 5, one at 7 and one at 9. All serve hearty but unsurprising fare, so we opted for the middle option – the shop, selling everything from fishing flies to jewellery, and king portions so enormous we left half and still felt full. Barring a few leisure fishing boats, the town exists to support the Doubtful Sound trips so the only place to hang out of a Saturday night is the bar at the Citadel, so all the local citizens between the ages of – er –16 and 26 were there, playing the bandits, challenging each other at table football or pool, lounging in the worn-out sofas (that was us) hugging everyone who came through the smokers’ shelter on the verandah and wishing Happy New Year (also us) and generally partaking of good-humoured banter along with an excellent array of beers and wines. The large bar is decorated with relics from the power station when it was updated in the 1950s, plus two ceiling fans made into huge model helicopters. The Ladies’ and Gents’ are labelled Safe Area and Heavy Machinery, respectively. Such is the subtlety and ingenuity of Kiwi humour in the bar at the end of the road.