TSS Earnslaw Cruise

Most heritage vessels you can pay to board are preserved. The Earnslaw is employed. She has been crossing Lake Whakatipu since 1912, she still burns coal shovelled in by hand, and the timetable she runs is a commercial one — which is why the engine room is hot, loud and open to anyone who walks down the stairs.

Built inland, twice

She was built in Dunedin in 1912, which is a problem when the lake you are for is on the other side of the Southern Alps. The solution was to finish her, take her apart, number every quarter-inch hull plate, load the pieces onto goods wagons and rail them across the island to Kingston at the foot of Lake Whakatipu — where she was riveted back together and launched in October of that year, the same year as the Titanic.

At the time she was the largest steamship built in New Zealand and the biggest thing on the lake. Her job was not tourism. There was no road up the western shore then and there is no public one now, so she carried the wool, the stock, the mail, the coal and the people that kept the high-country stations going — Walter Peak among them. That is where the nickname comes from: the Lady of the Lake.

Nearly gone

By the late 1960s the road network had caught up with most of what she did, and she was close to being scrapped. The company that is now RealNZ took her on, put her back into passenger service, and has run her ever since. She is, as far as anyone can establish, the last coal-fired, hand-stoked commercial passenger steamship still operating in the southern hemisphere.

What that means on board

The engine room is the reason to sail her. You stand on a grating above two working steam engines — polished brass, red flywheels turning, the smell of hot oil — and watch a stoker feed the fireboxes with a shovel. Nothing about it is staged; the ship needs the coal.

Above that there is a small museum of historical photographs, the skipper’s wheelhouse to look into, a cafe and a licensed bar, and open deck the length of her. Someone usually plays the piano in the saloon on the way back.

This cruise, or a Walter Peak option?

This listing is the 90-minute cruise with no landing — out into the west arm and back to the wharf. It is the cheapest way aboard and the right call when your day is already full.

If you have three and a half hours, the same ship also runs to Walter Peak, and then the crossing becomes the front half of something bigger: the gourmet BBQ at the Colonel’s Homestead, or the farm tour with the working dogs, the shearing demonstration and tea in the old woolshed. Both are options on the Earnslaw as well as on the modern catamaran, and the vessel comparison explains which one to book for which trip.

One practical note that catches people out: the vessel is fixed at checkout, not at the wharf. If it is the steamship you want, book the option that names her — the Earnslaw sittings sell out before the catamaran ones do.