People have been getting on boats to see this lake for well over 140 years.

It's easy to assume lake tourism on Wānaka is a modern thing — something that arrived with rental campervans and Instagram. It isn't. People have been getting on boats to see this lake for well over 140 years, and the story of how that started says a lot about why this place has always pulled people in.

A boat trip on this lake was worth doing before the town had much else going for it at all.

The First Hotel

Tourism in the town traces back to 1867, when Theodore Russell opened the settlement's first hotel. At the time the town was still called Pembroke, gold was still being pulled out of Cardrona up the valley, and the idea of people travelling here purely to look at the scenery was still a fairly new one. The hotel gave visitors somewhere to actually stay, which turned out to matter quite a lot.

A Paddle Steamer Named the Theodore

By 1883, that trickle of visitors had grown enough to justify something bigger: a paddle steamer, named the Theodore, began offering cruises out onto the lake. For the first time, people weren't just passing through Pembroke — they were coming specifically to get out on the water and see the lake and mountains from a boat, which is, when you get down to it, still exactly the pitch today.

A Town Built Around a View

What's striking looking back is how early this all started, relative to the town itself. Pembroke had barely been surveyed, was smaller than the gold town up the valley, and hadn't even settled on its permanent name — yet people were already deciding a boat trip on this lake was worth doing. That's a pretty strong vote of confidence in the scenery, delivered before the town had much else going for it at all.

The Same Water, A Long Line of Boats

The Theodore is long gone, and so is the world it operated in, but the basic idea hasn't changed: get people out on Lake Wānaka, on a boat, to see mountains and water that don't really need any embellishment. It's a strange thing to think about halfway through a modern charter — that you're doing something people have been doing here since 1883, just with better fishing gear and a considerably more comfortable ride.

The tradition's still going. Book a half-day or full-day lake tour and take your own turn on the water.