In the newfound quiet, these calls were possibly heard more clearly than before and capitalized on the growing awareness of the negative impacts of overtourism on the country’s natural environment and precious ecosystems. In a post-Covid world, New Zealand tourism will be more sustainable and cater to wealthy visitors the government has announced.

If sustainability is a prerequisite for the tourism activities allowed in the future, then what I wonder will happen to heli-skiing, jet boating, scenic flights, skydiving, and quad biking?

Will the iconic TSS Earnslaw still fit the bill and send puffs of black smoke into the sky and the smell of burning coal to linger over the lakeshore? Launched in 1912, the same year as the Titanic, the steamer still ferries passengers across the lake. And still, it operates on coal and is in fact the only remaining coal-fired, commercial passenger-carrying steamship still operating in the southern hemisphere. I imagine even the Alps 2 Ocean Cycle Trail will have to change. Advertised as the grandest of New Zealand’s Great Rides the 300km trail requires a helicopter flight over the Tasman River a mere 8 kilometres from the starting point to continue with the journey.

We met with a tourism operator in Queenstown who in principle agreed with this new focus but was shocked by what she believed to be the government’s intentional obliteration of thousands of small businesses to “clean up the industry”. She also pointed out how at odds the sustainable approach was with the government’s announcement to focus tourism on the super-wealthy (low-volume, high-value tourism is also the approach in Bhutan) and I tend to agree with her. The most expensive tourism activities are often the most environmentally damaging and no low-value tourist requires a private aircraft to fly to New Zealand nor a helicopter flight to reach Minaret Station. Foreign freedom campers have been blamed for shameful and disrespectful behaviour for years, often rightly so. Yet in the absence of international tourists, New Zealanders have proven to behave no better in their own backyard and were in fact called on to “‘See your own back yard’ – just don’t poo in it”.

Queenstown’s advance to one of New Zealand’s favourite holiday destinations has been a long time in the making. The city’s early history mirrors that of other towns in Otago: British settlers, sheep farmers, were the first Europeans to arrive on the scene but swamped with thousands of miners camped in shantytowns along the riverbank when gold was discovered in the Shotover River in 1862. Paddle steamers provided transport on Lake Wakatipu (elsewhere they built railways, in Central Otago for instance) like the 1912 TSS Earnslaw which is still in service today.

When all gold deposits had been exhausted, miners left for new fields on the West Coast and by 1900 the population had dwindled to 200. It was decades later, in the 1950s, that Queenstown developed into one of New Zealand’s most popular holiday destinations and started popularising extreme sports like commercial bungee jumping. Since then, tourism has been Queenstown’s mainstay and the number of visitors to Queenstown increased rapidly, from 200,000 in 1974 to 3.3 million in 2019.

Only recently that dependency became a challenge. There’s been much talk of “sustainability” and almost every business or accommodation provider claims it, in the belief that eco-friendly soap in refillable pump bottles will mitigate the impact that three million annual guests have on a little lakeside town; or that the use of recycling bins and encouraging “customers to take their photos and videos digitally on their phones rather than a physical USB” justifies “burning through petrol and on the lake” with a semi-submersible watercraft speeding across the water at 80km/h.

I think it’s reasonable to expect that New Zealand will allow fewer tourists into the country post-Covid and that fewer tourists will put less strain on the environment. But which way the scales will tip in this new era of travel – in favour of the environment or tourism revenue – remains to be seen. I’m not saying they’re mutually exclusive but I’m also not expecting to see millionaires on Intercity busses or in DOC backcountry huts anytime soon.