Walter Peak Farm Tour

Walter Peak sells two products that look almost identical on a booking page. One is a meal with a farm attached; the other is a farm with tea attached. If what drew you here was the dogs, the shearing and the animals, the farm tour is the one to book — and the money you save is not the only reason.

What you actually get more of

On the farm tour, the two hours ashore are structured around the station rather than the dining room. A rural host takes the group to the amphitheatre and works a mob of sheep with heading dogs and huntaways — two different jobs that people usually assume are one, and the host will explain the difference while it is happening in front of you. A blade-shearing demonstration follows, which is on the farm-tour options and not on the buffet ones.

Then comes the farmyard walk. You go through the holding pens where you can feed sheep and red deer by hand and get up close to the Scottish Highland cattle, and this is the part that carries a young family through the afternoon. It is also the part that gets cut short when you have a buffet sitting to keep.

The station is real, and old

Europeans first ran stock on this shore in the 1860s. The Mackenzie family took Walter Peak over in the late 1880s and worked it for around eighty years, and at its height the station covered 170,000 acres and carried 40,000 sheep — one of the best-known properties in New Zealand. What you see today is a fraction of that, but the demonstrations are drawn from work that still gets done here, which is the line between this and a petting zoo.

What you give up

The wood-fired buffet at the Colonel’s Homestead. Instead you get morning or afternoon tea in the old woolshed — scones, cakes and slices with tea and coffee, and it is included rather than an upsell. That is a genuinely good afternoon tea and a genuinely smaller meal. If you are making this your dinner, book the BBQ.

Everything else is the same

The crossing is the same 45 minutes on the same two vessels. The gardens are open on the same terms. Free cancellation runs to 24 hours before departure either way, and the same practical rules apply: check in at 88 Beach Street thirty minutes early, there is no parking at the wharf, both vessels are cashless, and it is always colder on the lake than it is in town.

If you want the steamship specifically, book the option that names the TSS Earnslaw — the vessel cannot be swapped on the day. And if you would rather get up onto the farmland itself than watch from the amphitheatre, the horse trek rides out in groups of six or fewer to a lookout above the lake.

Still weighing it up? The which-cruise guide sets every Walter Peak option side by side against budget, season and who you are travelling with.