The Elephant In The Sky Tourism Industry experts love trotting out forecasts. Forecasts of visitor arrivals. Forecasts of how much they are going to spend. Forecasts of the, always positive, impacts all these people will have on New Zealand. More employment. Economic growth in the regions and so on. And yet the elephant in [...]
Does Tourism Bring People Together? It is often said that tourism has the power or maybe the possibility to bring people together. Amongst its supposed positive attributes are visitors learning about and learning to accept, even embrace, other cultures. Tourism often prides itself, at least in New Zealand, in showcasing indigenous culture, in our [...]
Food From a Micro Farm Last weekend I attended a workshop about market gardening on a micro scale. As you may be aware, we grow as much of the fresh vegetable produce as we can that is used in the Lodge kitchen. I attended because I was interested in how we could grow more [...]
Ours By Right This last summer, new signs went up by the popular swimming spot on the Rangitikei River outside River Valley Lodge. The signs are part of a nationwide initiative set up throughout New Zealand and administered by Regional Councils, in our case Horizons. Regional Councils in New Zealand, amongst their other roles, [...]
Farewell Indian Summer The month of May is the last month of our horse trekking season. May 2019 has been a phenomenal amazing month of dry weather and warm sunny days, with gorgeous vivid hues of blues, greens and gold, painting the landscape, highlighted by the soft light cast low on the [...]
River Lessons – What I have Learned from a Lifetime on the River Having spent a good deal of my working life either guiding on rivers, mostly the Rangitikei, or working in some other way associated with that pursuit, I thought it might be a good time to reflect a little on what those [...]
Back on the River Being not far away from my 61st birthday, I thought my days of rafting customers on the Grade 5 section of the Rangitikei River were over. Recently, that has proved not to be the case. Winter is always when the older experienced senior guides come out of the woodwork. This [...]
There is Something Fishy in This Picture A fisherman stands thigh deep in a crystal-clear mountain fed stream. He casts, sending his line to softly settle on the stream surface. The fly, an imitation of an insect, floats enticingly, daring any hungry trout to rise and strike. Strike the fish does. A [...]
Is This Lunacy? Reductionism and a Mechanical Viewpoint in Action New Zealand’s ETS, or Emissions Trading Scheme, is a complicated beast. However, I just read an article about some of the potential effects of it. The article was by Neal Wallace in Farmers Weekly, a free newspaper-style weekly publication. This article dealt in part [...]
Where Is The Nearest McDonalds? Here at River Valley Lodge, it is lunchtime. Guests are coming in from morning activities, be that rafting, horse trekking, or simply having been for a walk. Others on warmer days will have spent time swimming or lazing out by the river. Many of course will not have left [...]
