Reporter's Diary

Press, 15 August 1980, Page 2

Reporter's Diary

See Neic Zealand . . . VISITORS to New Zealand who buy an air pass, giving • them unlimited air travel in this country for a certain number of days, are likely to find their itinerary more limited than they would expect. Foreign tourists are able to buy either an Air New Zealand or a Mount Cook Lines air pass, but the two are not interchangeable. Tourists who buy an air pass from Air New Zealand ($199 for 14 days or $299 for 21 days) can fly to all the main centres but not to the Bay of Islands, Mount Cook, or Queenstown. Tourists who buy a Mount Cook Lines air pass ($2lO for seven days and $2O for each additional day) can fly only to Auckland, the Bay of Islands, Rotorua, Christchurch, Queenstown, and Rotorua. While Air New Zealand offers more for your money in terms of

possible ports of call, only Mount Cook has all the popular tourist resorts on, its scheduled flights, but the Mount Cook air pass does not include charter flights, such as sightseeing trips to the Tasman Glacier.

... as others see it BOTH Air New Zealand and Mount Cook. Lines say it is too soon to tell if their respective air passes are successful. Air New Zealand introduced its unlimited travel for tourists scheme in May, and says that it will not know until the end of the summer how the scheme is going. The scheme was introduced deliberately in the off-sea-son so that, if any teething troubles arose, they could be sorted out. before the summer influx of tourists. Mount Cook Lines has had an air pass system for longer, but its present prices were set in June. It has not been in great de-

mand yet, but the airline expects that it will become more popular as more tourists get to hear about it. In spite of Air New Zealand’s campaign to “See New Zealand before you leave the country,” its air pass will not be sold in New Zealand to local tourists. It is available only to overseas visitors and is intended to stimulate the tourist trade. Mount Cook Lines sells its air pass only outside New Zealand, too. Long tour? AS IF the one-way, transTasman migration wasn’t bad enough said a reader yesterday. She was commenting on a raffle, for which tickets were being sold yesterday at the Hornby Mall. The sign above the raffle stall said that it was to raise funds to send a sports team on a *T9-year trip to Australia.” What it should have said, she discovered later, was to send a sports team of “19-year-olds on a trip to Australia.” Double vision? A WATER - COLOUR thought to have been paint-

ed by Adolf Hitler was sold for $650 at an auction at Penzance, England, this week. The painting is of an Austrian village scene, signed A. Hitler, 1911, and is thought to be genuine. The auctioneer, Mr David Lay, said that he thought the picture, of a horse and cart in an avenue of trees, was “ugly.” “If you look at the trees on either side of the road, you will see that the shadows- meet in the middle,” '.he ’ said. “To do that, you would need to have two suns, but. I suppose, with Hitler, anything was possible.”. Choice animal

A SPONSORSHIP scheme, rather like the one at Cristchurch’s Orana Park, is in use at Sydney’s Taronga Park Zoo. One of the more recent groups to decide to sponsor an animal is the Sydney Softball Association, which has appropriately chosen a bat. The sponsored creature will, of course, be known from now on as “Softball bat.”