Fond memories of Takapo¯ Hotel
It may be known worldwide as Lake Tekapo but one historic feature on the lake held on to the destination’s traditional Ma¯ori name, Takapo¯ .
The Takapo¯ Hotel was built on the southern side of the lake in the 1880s, opposite the site now home to the Church of the Good Shepherd.
Following a Timaru Herald story earlier this week about the area’s traditional name of Takapo¯ , Timaru woman Jennifer Anderson remembers staying at the ‘‘lovely building’’ in the settlement, in the mid-1940s, at about 10 years old.
‘‘There were big bedrooms and the four of us – I had a younger brother – were all able to stay in this very big room which was lovely. It [the room] was [named] Mt Cook, all the bedrooms were named after mountains,’’ she said.
‘‘You were really beside that lovely old bridge . . . I have very fond memories, happy times, usually there were other children to play with and they had a lovely table tennis table in the sun room area.’’
The hotel was a popular stop on the road between Burkes Pass and Lake Pukaki and featured in a series of postcards produced by Mt Cook Motor Car Service in 1910.
In 1920 it was bought by MP Thomas David Burnett (known as T D Burnett) whose family owned Mount Cook Station, one of the longest continually-owned farms in New Zealand.
Apparently due to frustration with shepherds turning up for work hungover, Burnett cancelled the hotel’s liquor licence earning himself the name ‘‘Rotten Tommy’’.
However, he did refurbish the hotel, added a second storey and restored the traditional Ma¯ori name, Takapo¯ Hotel.
The hotel changed hands several times in the following decades but in the 1950s, after the hydro dam was completed, the lake level was raised and both the bridge and hotel were demolished.
‘‘They said it would be flooded and in actual fact it wasn’t, in the end, flooded and it could have remained but there was an exercise training for those in compulsory military training and they went to blow it up,’’ Anderson said.
Mavis Robertson remembers arriving in Lake Tekapo when the post office, which had been housed in the hotel, was moved to the store in town.
Her family rescued some of the last photos taken of the hotel still standing after it was closed, in which you can clearly read the Takapo¯ Hotel sign, and a visitor book which was donated to the South Canterbury Museum.