Lumsden

Tiny towns in NZ really are tiny, but there’s still often a huge old pub-hotel, usually on a road junction; the biggest and frequently the ugliest building in town. (There’s sometimes a lovely old Bank of New Zealand too, but these have long-since been turned to other purposes.) The days when pub and hotel were the same thing have largely gone, but these places take you back to a past where the two functions went together. They may once even have been classy – I guess they were the only places to stay if you were travelling – though I surmise most of the clients were working men looking for employment, food, drink and a bed for the night. I guess they may often had a lot of ‘back-quarters’ which were more like tented cities than bricks-and-mortar.

The Hotel at Lumsden was my only option for an overnight stay between Queenstown and Te Anau, so here was potential for an adventure. Opening the door I met a stifling atmosphere of fried food and other pub smells; as I worked my way in through the fug I realised it was Sunday family night and half the town were there. The rain was crashing down outside, life was a bit crap; but in here it was close, muggy, smelly fellowship around cheap fried food and beer.

My room upstairs was also full of the fried food smell, which didn’t bode well – but things looked up once I’d got a breeze blowing through. The pub closed promptly at 8.30pm and I was left all alone for the night. In the photograph my room is the one with the light on, apparently the nicest room. And this is what it looked like.

Despite what the room might suggest, in the event nothing bad happened: the wifi worked, I slept well, the bed was comfortable and clean and there was even an electric blanket. The shared bathroom was like you’d expect from a 1950s school, though since I was the only guest it didn’t really matter. And the ‘free bread and peanut butter on the landing’ was a welcome treat. A group of ‘freedom campers’ in the car park over the road behaved themselves, though I learned something new: truckers despise freedom campers and often sound their horns as they rush past, just to keep the campers awake.