What are the most worthwhile things to do in Queenstown on a first visit?

The view comes first, and it has machinery. The Skyline Gondola has climbed from Brecon Street to Bob's Peak since November 17, 1967, when it opened as the steepest cable-car lift in the Southern Hemisphere. It rises about 1,480 feet (450 m), and the town has voted with its feet ever since: 56,000 people rode it in its first year; today the peak receives more than 800,000 visitors annually. The system was rebuilt again in 2023 with ten-person cabins, and the top station runs a luge — gravity carts on tracks first laid in 1998 — plus the trailhead of the Ben Lomond Track, which the Department of Conservation routes from the gondola's summit up through tussock to the 5,735-foot (1,748 m) summit of Ben Lomond itself.

The lake's own monument is older and slower. The TSS Earnslaw made her maiden voyage in 1912 — built in Dunedin, dismantled into numbered plates, railed to Kingston at the lake's southern end and reassembled there, at 168 feet (51.2 m) the largest steamship ever built in New Zealand. She is one of the world's oldest and largest coal-fired steamships still in regular service, and the last of the steamers that worked this lake from 1863, now cruising to Walter Peak High Country Farm on the far shore while passengers watch the stokers feed her boilers between decks.

Then the gorge. Fifteen minutes east of town, the Kawarau Gorge Suspension Bridge hangs 141 feet (43 m) above the jade-green Kawarau River, and in November 1988 AJ Hackett and Henry van Asch opened the world's first commercial bungy operation from its deck — a year after Hackett's dawn jump from the Eiffel Tower had made him briefly famous and briefly arrested. Watching from the bridge costs nothing and delivers most of the theater. The river offers the moving version: jet boats, a New Zealand invention developed in the 1950s for shallow braided rivers, run the Shotover canyon at speed with the famous 360-degree spins. And the drive that finishes the set runs 29 miles (46 km) along the lake's western shore to Glenorchy, where the Dart River valley and the beech forests around Paradise stood in for Middle-earth — Isengard and Lothlórien country — in the Lord of the Rings films.

From the gondola's top terrace the town lies directly below like a model — Steamer Wharf, the gardens' dark pines, the lake bending away in both directions — and behind you the Ben Lomond track climbs a golden tussock ridge toward a summit cairn that looks, from here, close enough to touch.

The Earnslaw is the Titanic's contemporary, and she won. Launched in the same year, 1912, the little lake steamer has outlasted her famous sister by more than a century of continuous work — goods boat, ferry and excursion steamer on the same lake, never having sailed any other water. Passengers can stand in her engine room and watch the original machinery do the job it has done since before the First World War.

• Morning — The gondola on its first cabins, before the queues: the Bob's Peak terrace in early light, and the Ben Lomond saddle walk if the day is fine and the legs agree.
• Midday — The Earnslaw's late-morning sailing to Walter Peak, with the farm demonstration and lunch across the lake filling the day's center.
• Evening — Out to the Kawarau Bridge before dinner, when the last jumpers of the day are going off the deck and the gorge light turns the river its deepest green.

The gondola is the town's magnet and its queue: on peak-season afternoons the wait at Brecon Street can eat an hour, and the complex at the top is in a multi-year redevelopment whose final phase runs toward 2029, so parts of the summit experience change between visits. Ben Lomond is a genuine alpine summit — DOC grades the full climb a full-day tramping track, and the weather at 5,735 feet owes nothing to the weather at the wharf. The Earnslaw, being a working piece of 1912, also leaves the water for survey and maintenance in the quieter weeks, usually in late autumn or winter; check her sailing calendar before building a day around her.

Book the gondola for early morning, the Earnslaw a day ahead, and keep the Glenorchy drive for the clearest day of the stay — the food question in this group covers where the evenings go.