Mists rise from Mt. Owen at the end of Orr Street, Queenstown's main street I finally had a ride on the West Coast Heritage Railway a couple of weeks ago. The last time I tried to do it, my van tossed its mortal coil halfway up the Tarraleah Hill, which is itself about halfway between Hobart and Queenstown. Although the van has since been fixed, I have been a bit apprehensive about doing it again as the van is getting on and those hills haven’t gotten less steep. To my delight, because of the high fuel prices, our State Government has made the buses free around the state - not just the urban ones, to help rural tourist operators. A few of us were going to do this together, but we couldn’t agree on a mutually acceptable date when the train was also running, so here I was doing it alone. There was just one catch. The buses only ran on Tuesdays and Fridays to the West Coast, which meant spending three nights in Queenstown. I’d never been there as a tourist and it was the beginning o...
Veronika Wild
Practising Geographer - nature culture places people