Luxury Escapes Guide to Queenstown Dazzling in winter and equally spectacular in summer, action-packed Queenstown is New Zealand’s premier tourist town for a very good reason. Featured escape Travel guides Draped alongside lightning bolt–shaped Lake Wakatipu and ringed by jagged mountains, Queenstown offers the kind of scenery that expectant visitors to New Zealand fantasise about. If your appetite for the country was whetted by the Lord of the Rings/Hobbit movies, you’ll find things strangely familiar – a lot of it was filmed around the top of the lake. While the vibrant town centre and beautiful setting is enough of an attraction in itself, it’s as the base for a breathtaking array of outdoor pursuits on which the town has built its reputation as the ‘adventure capital of the world’. Commercial bungy jumping was born here, and it’s now just one of a multitude of adrenaline-pumping activities on offer. If the mood takes you, you can fling yourself off bridges, mountains and across canyons. You can jet-boat up rivers, raft down rapids and mountain-bike along double-black runs. You can luge, quad bike, paraglide, parasail, riverboard or skydive to your palpitating heart’s content. But sometimes you just can’t beat the more traditional thrills – and Queenstown offers access to some of the most picturesque skiing and hiking routes on the planet.