Queenstown’s airport is tucked between mountains, which is lovely in a photograph and slightly less lovely when you are trying to physically land an airplane in it.
We came in the first time and got close — close enough to see individual blades of grass, close enough that everyone had already done the quiet thing where you decide the flight went fine and you’re basically home. Then the engines spooled back up and we climbed. Wind. The pilot came around and tried again from the other runway direction, got down to what felt like fifty feet, and pulled up a second time. Two runs at the ground, two polite retreats, and then the announcement nobody wants on the leg they’ve been looking forward to for two years: we were diverting to Christchurch for the night.
Now, here’s the thing about traveling with Matt. Matt is a master planner. The kind of person who has a backup dinner reservation for a city he was not supposed to be in. We hadn’t been on the ground in Christchurch for an hour before he’d produced a plan: Kaiser Brew Garden, in the Riverside Market — a whole building of restaurants that used to be shipping-container eateries, now a proper food hall. We ate well, slept, and flew back the next morning, and this time the mountains let us in.
I want to be honest about why I’m telling you this instead of just showing you the pretty version. The pretty version is real too — Queenstown turned out to be a genuine dream, and I’ll get to that. But the brand here has always been I was actually there, and “actually there” includes the part where the plane wouldn’t land and we ate schnitzel in a city we hadn’t booked. The trip is the trip. The mishaps are half of why it’s worth writing down.
What we got once we finally landed
Everything, basically. Go-karts and dinner at the top of Skyline Queenstown, looking down over the whole valley. A perfect crisp fall day in Arrowtown, renting bikes and riding out through the countryside to wineries. And a bus-and-boat run out to Milford Sound — we were supposed to fly, but it rained the entire time, so we bused it. Which sounds like a downgrade until the rain turned every cliff face into a waterfall that only exists when it’s pouring. Cold, soaked, worth it. That’s a sentence I could put under half the photographs I’ve ever taken.
The part that pays for the story
A lot of what I shot on the South Island is heading into the print store — Queenstown, the Southern Alps, the road out to Milford. If you want the practical version of this trip, the full South Island photographer’s guide walks the whole route and tells you where to actually point the camera. And if you just want a small piece of New Zealand on your desk before the wall-sized version exists, start with the postcard. Nobody starts with the wall-sized version.
— Preston