Notebook: Who worries about overcrowding and pollution at the end of the world?

This really is the end of the road. For those who sometimes imagine being as far away as possible, at the furthest end of the earth before its curvature starts sending them home again, let me describe it.

First you will arrive at an airport among mountains, then drive through a bustling and rather glamorous-looking town with five-star hotels at the edge of a lake, a steamer hooting at the wharf, a gondola to the heights above. The sound of hammering marks the building and auctioning of houses and hotels for millionaires and the moguls of a burgeoning film industry.

At times the sky above the streets is filled with immense wings, wheeling slowly, as over a particular carcass. These are hang-gliders descending for lunch. Ignore all that, drive round the edge of a 50-mile-long lake which, on the map, looks like half a swastika. The names here are an odd mixture of Gaelic (Ben this and Burn that) and Maori (wakatipu and wanaka). Eventually you will see, rising ahead of you, a line of mountains, hung here and there with glaciers, although the temperature at road-level is 30C (85F).

Drive on to a place called Glenorchy which has one shop, two pubs and a sports club, where, in the first crime for years, a teenager broke in recently and pinched the liquor and the cash-box. Even in Glenorchy the tendrils of money and trendiness have arrived, bringing with them hints of Colorado and the Tyrol. There are hexagon-shaped adobe houses, a cafe serving venison and wildberry jus, a new lodge - all porches and gables, and an extraordinary building with a roof of live turf, though that has yellowed badly in the summer drought.

You may be too late to encounter, as I did, a group of 12 Bentleys, circa 1930, open tourers with long, high bonnets, being driven by men who looked and sounded like Sir Alec Douglas-Home. They, the British Bentley Club on a Southern Hemisphere outing, left Glenorchy and puttered away happily towards a vista of rainforests and glaciers.

Leave on the same road and wind along a dusty white lane another 20 miles or so. On one side, a cold, wide river is hissing, on the other are steep hills, covered at first with sheep, then forest, then scrub. The glaciers now shine almost directly above you. And then, suddenly your car can go no further. This is it. The roads which cover the world in a net millions of miles long here run out, at the place you first thought of, the uttermost end of the earth, the (more-or-less) exact antipodes. You are in the western part of the province of Otago in the South Island of New Zealand.

There is utter silence.

Then you observe you are not alone, after all. There are people watching you, rather crossly. And there are more over there. Who are they? And what, also, is that distant but growing clatter in the air?

First, the people. They are, very probably, Germans. Germans, like the finest lubricating oil, penetrate everywhere and, like you, have come here to get away from it all. You, although there for the same reason, represent "It All", and their faces close. The noise from above will be any one of a swarm of helicopters, ferrying tourists, shooting commercials of Jaguar or Saab, or scouting locations for films. This part of the South Island, once a by-word for remoteness, is now emphatically on the map. David Bowie, Jack Nicklaus and Michael J Fox come and go.

Four feature films have been made here, and this year Lord of the Rings, with a budget of about pounds 100m and thousands of extras, is to be shot in the hobbity recesses of the mountains. (The project is wrapped in secrecy but Sean Connery is reported to have been cast as the wizard Gandalf).

At the other end of the lake, the little town of Arrowtown, not long ago scarcely more than a few rows of gold miners' cottages, is now a rich man's enclave. Wine-making has arrived, adding a classical weave to the landscape. The first vines, started 15 years ago, to the sound of derision, are producing marvellous vintages. (There are now more vines than sheep in New Zealand, which may, possibly, lay to rest that terrible old joke about farmers and ewes).

Queenstown is an airline's dream - an all-year destination. In Europe's summer it offers spectacular winter skiing. During the northern winter it offers cloudless heat, swimming, trekking, canoeing. At dinner you may meet one of the bungee millionaires, men who have made a fortune persuading strangers to hurl themselves into an abyss attached to a rubber band. Queenstown is the bungee capital of the world (although the cult began in the Solomon Islands and was refined by British students who practised off the Severn Bridge in the sixties).

Given all this activity, the horrid fate of the goose that laid the golden egg inevitably comes to mind. Too many people knocking about in a forest (Janet Street-Porter was sighted in a nearby spinney recently), and too many helicopters above it, destroy what everyone has come to see. At one wonderful place, Thunder Creek Falls, we walked through the bush, stripped off (no one was around), plunged under the cascade and then found we were also under the gaze of two dozen Japanese tourists, who had materialised silently across the river. When we got back to the road, the car-park was full of empty coaches, their engines running, pouring out black diesel fumes in a jolly manner not seen in Britain for years.

No one objects. There is a huge political row going on in New Zealand at the moment over a decision to grant Saatchi and Saatchi a US$100m (pounds 65m) contract to attract foreign tourists, while at the same time it was discreetly advising the government on re-election tactics. The accusations of cronyism and mis-directed millions, not to mention the spectacle of Prime Minister Jenny Shipley's old personal friendship with the head of Saatchi and Saatchi Worldwide , one Kevin Roberts, all became too much for the government and Saatchi was dumped from the account this month. But in all the rumpus, not a single voice was heard questioning the basic premise - the more tourists the better.

The size and overall emptiness of the country provides the only consolations. The South Island, with an area about the size of England, has a population of 800,000. For every valley invaded, there are 20 beyond, harder to reach perhaps, and not as spectacular, where the silence is profound and only the bellbirds are heard, and where the dimpled knee of Janet Street-Porter or the gloomy brows of Sean Connery will probably never be seen.