Queenstown sells itself as the adventure capital of the world, all bungy cords and jet boats, but behind the neon there is a small gold-rush town with a long memory. This walk finds it. You start at the foot of the Skyline Gondola, with the option of riding up to the most famous view in town, then walk down past the pioneer cemetery, the town's war memorial hall, the little green where the tent town of 1862 stood and a stone church full of surprises, before climbing to the gate of the Queenstown Hill Time Walk, a track whose plaques tell the town's story as you go up. On foot it is about 2.5 kilometers, roughly a mile and a half, mostly downhill or flat until a steady climb at the end. It is one of the most varied self-guided walking tours in New Zealand for so short a distance.

Before you set off

Allow about an hour and a half for the walk itself at an easy pace, plus extra time for the gondola if you ride it. Be clear about one thing before you start: this tour does not climb Bob's Peak on foot. The gondola ride is an optional detour at the first stop. If you take it, ride up, enjoy the view, ride back down and pick up the walk from the bottom station. If you would rather earn the view, the Tiki Trail climbs from near the cemetery to the top through the forest in about an hour for most people. It is short but steep, and many walkers hike up and ride down. Check before you go whether the gondola is running and what it costs, because strong wind can stop it. The last stretch of the walk, to the start of the Queenstown Hill Time Walk, climbs residential streets for about fifteen to twenty minutes. The hill track itself is a separate outing of two to three hours return to the summit, and you can stop at the gate if you prefer. This is mountain country, and the weather turns fast: sunshine can become cold wind, rain or even snow on the tops within an hour. Carry a warm layer, a rain jacket, water and sunscreen, and wear shoes with some grip.

Skyline Gondola

Stand at the bottom station and follow the cables with your eyes as they rise almost straight up the forested slope to the buildings perched on Bob's Peak, more than 400 meters above you. The gondola opened in 1967 and has been rebuilt and enlarged since, and it is often called one of the steepest cable car lifts in the Southern Hemisphere. If you ride it, the view from the top is the one on the postcards: the town spread out below, Lake Wakatipu bending away between the mountains, the jagged Remarkables to the east, and Cecil Peak and Walter Peak across the water. Bob's Peak is a shoulder of the much higher mountain behind it, Ben Lomond, and that mountain has an older name, Te Taumata-o-Hākitekura, the hilltop of Hākitekura. In the story told by Kāti Māmoe and Ngāi Tahu, Hākitekura was a chief's daughter who watched the young people of the villages hold swimming races, though no one had ever swum the whole way across the lake. From the mountain she studied the water, then one night she swam it, the first woman to do so. Several places around the lake still carry her name, including the Kelvin Peninsula across the water. Next door to the station is a wildlife park where you can see kiwi. When you are ready, walk back down Brecon Street, the road you came up, and in a minute or two the cemetery opens on your right.

Queenstown Cemetery

Queenstown from above This is the town's pioneer cemetery, laid out on the lower slope of Bob's Peak in the early years of the gold rush. Wander slowly. Look for the old white marble headstones, weathered soft by more than a century of mountain frost, and the cast-iron railings that families put around their graves. Read a few of the inscriptions and you start to see what life was like in a gold town. The dates on many stones are cruelly young. Drowning was so common on the goldfields of New Zealand, in fast, freezing rivers like the Shotover, that people called it the New Zealand death. Miners died in rockfalls and floods and of the cold, and children died of fevers that would be easily treated today. Somewhere among them, in the Catholic section, lies Julia Eichardt, born in County Tipperary in Ireland in 1839. She came to Queenstown in 1863, in the first rush, married the hotelier Albert Eichardt, and ran the famous hotel on the lakefront for ten years after his death. When she died in 1892, the town closed for the afternoon, and about four hundred mourners followed her coffin here. The road along the cemetery leads to the start of the Tiki Trail, if you want to climb Bob's Peak after all. Otherwise, walk down Brecon Street, turn left onto Isle Street, then right down Camp Street and left into Memorial Street, about seven minutes.

Queenstown Memorial Centre

The building beside the sports ground is the Queenstown Memorial Centre, and it is a memorial you are meant to use. It was built in the late 1950s as the town's memorial hall for the Second World War. After that war, many New Zealand towns chose to remember their dead with useful buildings, halls and pools and sports grounds, rather than another statue, and these are often called living memorials. The town's First World War memorial is older and quite different: a set of stone gates at the entrance to the Queenstown Gardens by the lake, unveiled on Anzac Day in 1922. Here, in the foyer, glass plaques list the local men who died in both world wars. It is worth thinking about what those lists meant for a place this size, where everyone knew everyone. Each year on 25 April, Anzac Day, the town gathers to remember them. The rest of the year the hall is busy with concerts, theater, conferences and community events, and the building was refurbished and extended in 2013. The open field next to it is the Queenstown Recreation Ground, the town's sports field, with the mountains rising behind it. Walk to the end of Memorial Street, turn right along Stanley Street, the busy main road, then right again down Ballarat Street toward the lake. The Village Green is on your right, about five minutes.