Queenstown is a centre where life swaggers brightly under the watchful gaze of death. David Loughrey spent a day in the resort.
Queenstown has some very particular gaits.
One is a sort of slow amble, an uncertain perambulation marked by plenty of looking around and rubbing of chins, common among tourists with no particular place to go, on lakeside Marine Parade.
Closer to the centre of commerce in Mall St it picks up a gear, and takes on a certain relaxed swagger, the misplaced confidence of adventurous youth.
Queenstown is something to do with the younger set.
They are all over the place, sporting beards, smooth, tanned skin and beanies, backpacks and backwards caps, check shirts and sunglasses, darting this way and that on a quest for something probably indefinable even to themselves.
It is also a well-dressed town, where even the smattering of elderly make an effort to look spruce as they limp about, lest they bring down the tone.
It is a town of a certain leisure, where sitting in the sun and talking is an activity with a strong following, even on a weekday.
But that sitting is book-ended by bursts of frenzied adventure, as the living flirt with death, as if to prove their very existence.
Paragliders toy with the ever-present prospect of uncontrolled falling as they waft colourfully from above; in jet-boats, tourists strapped tightly to water-borne rockets race centimetres from rocky crags; from high perches, bungy jumpers leap into the unknowable void, all tempting the Grim Reaper, offering themselves to oblivion, only to be dragged back by parachute or bungy cord from the jaws of death.
In Queenstown, death and youth have a relationship and a history.
Walk up Brecon St, up the nicely designed and slightly physically challenging set of stairs, head towards the gondolas, then take a hard left up Cemetery Rd.
Just up from the mini-golf course, the neatly mown and attractive green cemetery lawns provide the permanent home of some of the town's early residents.
In the form of brooding angels, beneath listing lichen-covered gravestones, in the shadow of sturdy cruciforms, the dead look down upon the living.
Young John Daniel, who died many years ago ''from the effects of a fall from his poney'' at just 10 years of age, watches the paragliders and perhaps meditates on the meaning of the phrase ''Thy Will be Done'' inscribed on his tomb.
The McEwen family, Thomas and Jane, who both died aged 24, but not before they buried little Neil in 1875, laid in his grave at just 9 years old, huddle together and consider the shortness of life, passed away before they knew it was passing.
Nearby Mary Cameron, whose time came at just 30 years of age in Frankton, lies a long way from her birthplace of Ballyshannon, County Donegal, Ireland.
Perhaps - incorporeal - they sit together on the seat that commemorates 100 years of women's suffrage, and watch.
They see merchants with windows bursting with the sheepskin needed to feed what must be a wool addiction in the town, and watch tourists longing for good health buying jars of natural dietary supplements.
Their ghostly eyes watch men with ponytails and sunglasses and jeans, German couples in camper vans and French tourists playing with their children by the lake.
They wonder at a stall offering palmistry and psychic readings and a vessel shaped like a shark that travels both above and below the water.
They see cranes and building sites and apartments and restaurants and bars, racks of postcards and possum-fur mittens.
They may baulk at the clamour of humanity, see from the perspective of the dead the distractions of the living who forget the moment and crave a future that itself will be lost in plans and dreams.
They may quote Roman stoic philosopher Seneca (also dead) and cry: ''They lose the day in expectation of the night, and the night in fear of the dawn.''
But as the sun sets on Queenstown, the wraiths surely drift ghostly over the lakefront and see the willows gently dipping their fingers in the cool clear water that ripples over the pebbles underneath.
They marvel at the little black ducks that bob on the gentle swell and the silver fish that slide through the cold.
Above, the snow-dusted sinews of muscular black peaks still wrap their one-time home in scenes of majesty and awe.
And the dead understand - these are the moments life is made of.
