The several days after our return from Milford were spent in Queenstown,
the perfect location for re establishing our fat stores with excessive eating and drinking, interspersed with shopping and a little light jet boating.
Too soon (or maybe just in time) it was over, we dropped our friends at the airport and headed out east to visit our daughters in Dunedin.
En route we stayed a night in Cromwell. The town is famous for three things: the giant plastic group of fruits at the entrance; and two periods of human led devastation – the gold rush, and the creation of Lake Dunstan thanks to the Clyde Dam.
The gold rush dating back to the early 1860’s did more damage to the landscape than I had appreciated. At the Bannockburn sluicings, you can walk in a loop track of just over an hour to see how the early gold diggers redirected a stream which they then used to help dig out and wash away a whole hillside to get at the gold in the soil. It’s a desolate valley surrounded by vineyards.
Think Big was an era in the 70’s and 80’s when Piggy Muldoon was prime minister, and they wanted to set up some big energy projects (I haven’t researched any of this, it’s just what’s already there in my gen X brain). Making big dams to harness hydroelectric power was one such project, well before anyone was talking about green, renewable energy. I’m sure they would have made coal mines or drilled for oil if we’d had the appropriate geology. It was only a few wimpy hippies that worried about ecological damage to the land that was going to be flooded by these projects, as well as some old fogies unannaturally attached to old buildings. The dam didn’t get started collecting water until the early 90’s, and some historical buildings had already been shifted in Cromwell. Lake Dunstan covers about a block of old Cromwell, and those buildings that couldn’t be saved were demolished, partially or completely. The shifted buildings have been put together in an area by the lake to make a faux historic district which is quite cute.
It was just round the corner from our Air BNB so we had dinner at a restaurant there, a much more appealing prospect than driving over to the soulless shopping mall in the newer part of town.