The TSS Earnslaw launched in 1912, the year the Titanic sank, and remains the Southern Hemisphere's last coal-fired passenger steamship. Her twin screws churn Lake Wakatipu's 84-kilometre glacial trench six times daily, ferrying visitors between Queenstown's Steamer Wharf and the Walter Peak high-country station. The vessel was built in Dunedin, disassembled into 4,500 numbered pieces, shipped by rail to Kingston, then rebuilt on the lakeshore. Her engine room — open to passengers — still burns a tonne of coal per round trip. Walter Peak homestead, established in the 1860s during New Zealand's merino boom, sprawls across 60,000 acres of beech forest and tussock plateau. The lakefront homestead garden, planted in the 1920s, shelters heritage roses and stone-walled terraces that descend to a private wharf. Queenstown cruise lunch tickets grant access to both the steamship passage and a seated gourmet BBQ in the homestead's Colonel's Homestead restaurant, where floor-to-ceiling windows frame the Remarkables range. The menu cycles through Central Otago lamb, Akaroa salmon, and seasonal salads dressed with Marlborough olive oil. Lake Wakatipu itself is New Zealand's third-largest lake, carved by glacial advance 15,000 years ago into a 380-metre-deep reverse-lightning shape. Maori legend holds that the lake's seven-centimetre tidal oscillation — a seiche caused by atmospheric pressure shifts — is the heartbeat of Matau, a giant burned alive on the lakebed. The Earnslaw's route threads past Bob's Cove, Cecil Peak, and the drowned ghost town of Edith Cavell, a 1920s farming settlement abandoned when wool prices collapsed. Passengers on the foredeck can watch the stokers feed the twin boilers through brass-rimmed portholes. The return crossing, scheduled to coincide with afternoon light on the Humboldt and Harris mountains, offers unobstructed views across the basin that Walter Peak's merino flocks once dominated.