New Zealand Looked At By Malayan Writer

Press, Volume C, Issue 29662, 4 November 1961, Page 14

New Zealand Looked At By Malayan Writer

“New Zealand, where the works of man fall slightly short of the work? of nature,” saysa heading in the “Straits Times,” Malaya, on an article by a staff writer who visited New Zealand recently. The writer, John Cal ver, is critical of the country’s facilities for tourists. “Transport services are good, but other tourist facilities are below world standard,” he says. “New ■ Zealand may be advised to make a study of Japan, which has a similar terrain and similar scenic attractions,” he continues. “The social and human contrasts are so striking as to point up some of the more obvious improvements New Zealand can make if it honestly desires a world-class tourist industry. “Hotels, apart from those operated by the Government, are poor and cold. Porters are seldom seen and rooms with baths are as rare as the tuatara, the three-eyed miniature dinosaur that was probably the country's only four-legged creature before

the coming of the Maori and the European with their domestic animals. “The traveller must creep down chilly corridors in search of even colder bathroom even in Rotorua, where there is likely to be boiling water in the ground below the visitor’s feet. "Barbaric Laws” “The key to their poor standard is a set of liquor laws among the world’s most barbaric. The bars, all attached to hotels which are generally owned by breweries, open at 9 a.m. and close at 6 pun. The traveller cannot have a glass of wine with his lunch or dinner in a restaurant, but he will find more public drunkenness in the streets of Wellington at 7 p.m. on a week-day than in a Malayan bar at midnight on New Year’s Eve. "Until the laws are altered to enable the hotels to open and operate high-class public restaurants, serve liquor in them at reasonable hours and charge for it, the financial basis for better standards does not exist.

“For the hotels it may be said that the food, served to guests only, is good, plain, and plentiful.”