Govt rejects plan to ban cruise ships from Milford Sound
The government has rejected a vision to ban cruise ships from Milford Sound and close its airstrip while announcing $15.2 million for infrastructure upgrades and conservation projects.
In 2021, a master plan for the destination was unveiled, making a raft of recommendations including not allowing cruise ships in the inner sound and closing the airstrip, before undergoing feasibility testing.
The reasoning given at the time was the airstrip was in a poor state, exposed to flooding and tsunami risks, expensive to rebuild to a modern standard and only carried about three percent of visitors while the visual impact and risk of cruise ships conflicted with the majority of land-based visitors.
Last year, the Milford Opportunities Project reported to ministers on the feasibility of the masterplan, which also included recommendations to create a park and ride system to reduce congestion, and charge overseas visitors a fee.
Tourism and Hospitality Minister Louise Upston said Piopiotahi played a key role in helping the country's tourism sector to bounce back.
"We are supporting the local economy and providing certainty for operators by enabling cruise ships and aircraft to continue to access the fjord, rejecting a previous proposal to ban this," she said.
While documents released by the Department of Conservation suggested local sentiments towards banning cruise were positive, the airstrip removal prompted a backlash from tourism operators who said it could discourage visitors and impact livelihoods.
Conservation Minister Tama Potaka has announced the government would invest $15.2 million in the region as part of the first tranche of decisions from the Milford Opportunities Project with aims to sustainably grow tourism while protecting the taonga.
"This iconic UNESCO World Heritage site in Fiordland attracts more than a million visitors a year and pumps about $200 million into the regional economy, creating jobs and boosting incomes," he said.
The funding would go towards new and enhanced short stops, including an alpine nature walk in Gertrude Valley, improving flood protection at Cleddau River, cleaning up Little Tahiti landfill - which [www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/529544/government-announces-funding-to-clean... received government funding last year], and much-needed new facilities at Deepwater Basin.
The funding would come from the International Visitor Levy and about $7m from the Department of Conservation's capital works programme.
"For Ngāi Tahu, Piopiotahi holds special significance as the final masterpiece of atua and land-shaper Tū Te Rakiwhānoa," he said.
The next steps were for the Department of Conservation to engage with other stakeholders including Ngāi Tahu on further initiatives.
"These include collaborating on investment opportunities along Milford corridor, developing a multi-year investment plan for the area, and considering improved planning tools, such as a Special Amenities Area within Fiordland National Park," Potaka said.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Otago Daily Times
4 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
A world-class wilderness adventure that's right in the backyard!
The adventure that you've been craving is on your doorstep, with the amazing Hollyford Wilderness Experience in Fiordland. Hollyford Wilderness Experience business manager Adam Dooney was inspired by many things when he first did the guided multi-day walk. Along with the stunning scenery, it was the guides and the hosting staff at the lodges along the way that impressed him most. 'I did not expect the quality of delivery, and how much passion and intimacy they bring to the experience,' he says. A true adventure, the all-inclusive Hollyford Wilderness Experience is extremely accessible to most walkers The unforgettable three night experience was a winner of Trip Advisor's Travellers' Choice Award in 2024, ranking it as one of the world's top attractions. Yet while international travellers visit for such experiences, many locals aren't aware of what's on offer right here. For those mature travellers in the lower South Island looking for an accessible adventure, the Hollyford Wilderness Experience is the perfect choice. The low altitude walk will take you from the mountains to the sea, and includes spectacular transfers by jet boat and helicopter. Small groups of no more than 16 people are led by engaging local guides. The experience is coloured by their rich storytelling that takes in both the natural history, and that of Ngāi Tahu and early European pioneers. And comfort is not compromised on the Hollyford Wilderness Experience. You'll only carry the essentials, while well-appointed private lodges deep in the native forest offer private rooms, hearty cuisine, outdoor hot tubs, and warm hospitality. Adam Dooney says it's the entire experience that separates the Hollyford Wilderness Experience from other options in the area. 'It's not just another walk, it's a full experience,' he emphasises. 'The Hollyford is one of the most beautiful valleys in Fiordland. You see everything from the foothills of some of Fiordland's largest mountains, through the beech forests, and out to the coastal environment of the West Coast.' Walkers will be deeply immersed in the hugely diverse natural environment of this incredible part of Aotearoa. The extremely knowledgeable guides weave stories of the area throughout the walk. This includes the Hollyford's history as a pounamu trail, historical Ngāti Mahaki pā at Martins Bay, and the proposed European settlement of Jamestown from the Goldrush era. 'Our staff absolutely love the place and enjoy sharing it with people,' Adam says. 'Some have been working for us for 25 years, so there's a lot of knowledge and a lot of passion there. What shines through is the connection between our customers and staff, and that's what really brings the whole place to life for everybody.' What is on offer with the Hollyford Wilderness Experience is sure to appeal to an emerging segment of the adventure market who are focused on quality. They're looking for something different, a more fulfilling experience that they emerge from richer than when they went in. As Adam says, it's amazing what we have on our back doorstep in this country - and particularly in this region. 'Fiordland and the Hollyford Valley are right there for the taking,' he marvels. 'These walks are so accessible for many people, and on an international basis they offer great value for money.' Anyone looking for a superb experience should visit for more information, or have a chat with one of the reservation team on 0800 832 226.
Otago Daily Times
5 days ago
- Otago Daily Times
Hikers flock to Hump Ridge Track
One thousand additional walkers have trekked the Hump Ridge Track since it entered the international stage of the world's great walks a year ago. Hump Ridge Track operations lead Emily Serafini said walker numbers had jumped 33% since it gained Great Walk status in October 2024. "Last year we had about 3090 walkers, this year it's 4090." There had been a notable surge in track bookings after media coverage of the experience. It also gained more international attention after the AllTrails hiking app listed the Hump Ridge at number five in the top 25 world's best walks. "That weekend we were hit with so many bookings." The track, near Tuatapere, traditionally hosted about an 80% domestic market, but there were now more walkers arriving from Europe. But unlike the nation's other great walks run by the Department of Conservation, bookings are made through the trust's website, which is open all year. "We're a privately operated and self-funded, offering lodge comforts like hot showers and cold beer," Mrs Serafini said. She believed it was presently operating near 85% and already had bookings for the 25/26 and 26/27 seasons. Mrs Serafini said the growth in walking numbers was "pretty awesome". "The town [Tuatapere] flourishes during the season ... It's great to see the track come so far." The season ran from October 25, 2024, until April, 21, 2025. The three-day 60km loop walk along the south coast in Southern Fiordland weaves through native forest, sub-alpine ridges and beaches, with accommodation at Okaka Lodge and the Port Craig Lodge, and starts and ends about 30km from Tuatapere. The 125m Percy Burn viaduct — the world's largest surviving wooden viaduct — built in 1923, was one of the track's popular features. Tuatapere Te Waewae community board chairwoman Anne Horrell said the huge increase in walkers was "exciting". "We're sort of hoping that in time that this will have a good spin-off in a positive way for the community itself, in terms of people sleeping and staying in Tuatapere and being involved." Some walkers opted to to stay in Queenstown or Invercargill, she said. "We're really hoping that more and more people decide to stay in Tuatapere itself and enjoy the local attractions of not just Tuatapere but all of Western Southland. "We've got so much that's beautiful and lovely." Great South tourism and events general manager Mark Frood said the flourishing numbers was great news for the whole region. "It's really good to see. There's a lot of years of vision and work that's gone into getting it to that stage and getting it as a Great Walk and seeing that start to have some success, which is awesome." "It has been a bit of a journey to get there, but a whole lot of dedicated people have stuck at it for quite a long time." He frequently received feedback from Invercargill and regional residents who had met walkers. He believed when quality Southland walking tracks like the Hump Ridge attracted visitors, "everyone benefits". Southland has five of New Zealand's 11 Great Walks — the Milford, Routeburn, Kepler, Hump Ridge and Rakiura tracks. Southland was also rich with other hiking opportunities as well as the Great Walks, Mr Frood said. "We've got an enormous number of short walks, guided walks ... [they] add more strength to our region — that's what a lot of people come here for." When those experiences were added alongside the region's cycling trail network and the smaller walking tracks, it developed more interest in the region. "It gets people looking down in the region and then they start to understand what's around." He expected regional cottage industries, small business and employment to continue to blossom. "You see places like Mossburn, there's extra cafes that support the locals, they survive off the back of the visitors as well. "Where you see the tourists flow, you see opportunities. "So every little bit from the community aspect, builds — it's good to see tourism supporting the communities rather than overrunning the communities."
The Spinoff
7 days ago
- The Spinoff
Lights at a hut are like togs in a sauna
Around the country, DOC is upgrading backcountry huts with solar panels and electric lights. But as technology evolves, what are we losing? Dan Keane writes the newsletter where a version of this essay was first published. Years ago – the early aughts, must've been – I was drinking with an old buddy in a Brooklyn (New York) bar you could fairly call hipster. A Tuesday, maybe. Nothing crazy. We sat and listened to poets or singers or earnest dudes poking at laptops, I don't remember which. Everyone seemed to know each other. Friends watched friends make art. I remember feeling restless, a step outside the crowd, but then I always felt that way in New York. Was my jacket cool enough? Shouldn't I be making art, too? My buddy, though, was purring like a cat. This, he said, is my church. I thought of him last month when a Kiwi mate and I stomped into Powell Hut, high on the windswept shoulder of Mt. Holdsworth in Tararua Forest Park. Powell Hut is a 32-bed jewel – maybe the crown jewel – of New Zealand's backcountry hut system, which counts nearly a thousand overnight shelters tucked along Department of Conservation trails all up and down these islands. We had wheezed to the ridgeline deep inside a classic long white cloud; now we shed our wet boots in the cloak room, chose our bunks, and joined the trampers already gathered around a cheerful fire. Wet clothes hung on a rack over the stove. The hut's banged-up old kettle was still hot. We poured some tea and made gradually deepening small talk about the state of the weather, the nation, and the world, then set to sorting the hut's ancient, mismatched decks for a game of cards. This is my church. Then someone got up and turned on the lights. What? Huts don't have electricity! The whole point of a hut is to spend your aprés-tramp unwinding in the gathering 19th-century dusk, letting patient shadows claim the room until the head torches come out. Powell still has the tin wall sconces you see in many DOC huts, which are both relatively fire safe and warmly reflect candlelight around the room. Last time I was up, previous trampers had left candles stuck in old liquor bottles on the table. When was the last time you ate dinner by candlelight? A DOC spokesperson has since explained to me that lights, solar panels, and a battery were all installed at Powell way back in 2019, when the popular hut was rebuilt and expanded. I'd first gone up in 2020, on a chilly weekday in August. If I noticed the solar panels out the back window, I didn't guess what they were for. Not a single other tramper arrived to point out the light switch. I lit the candles in the bottles, ate my noodles, read the news on my phone and wondered if the world was going to end. A perfect tramp, really. The liquor bottles are gone now. One of the wall sconces has disappeared, too. The single, unmarked button just inside the front door is darkened with finger oils but still easy to miss. It's a timer switch like the kind you see in public restrooms. Punch the button and bam — it's a bus station. They're not fluorescent lights, I don't think. In 2025 they'd have to be LEDs. But LEDs still feel fluorescent to me, in the bad old way. Fluorescent light bulbs will / make an absence of dark / but the light just ain't there still. That was Modest Mouse back in the 90s, before climate change made us ban incandescents. Back when selling out was still bad. Back when there were no notifications or likes, and subscriptions got you an actual magazine you could hold. Our window of the pure and the good is always shifting. I'm old enough to have once declared I would never get a cell phone, and now here we were on the mountaintop, scrolling under the lights. Oh well. It was still a grand time. It was still kind of holy. Mountains are sacred. Most every culture agrees on this one, or we did. When my partner Jenny and I lived in Shanghai, we made several trips to Jiuhuashan, one of the four sacred mountains of Buddhism. Are we Buddhists? Are backpackers on the Camino de Santiago Catholic? We went up there as curious gringos, eager to bask in a big-tent human reverence for the unknown. Over the years of our visits, however, the Chinese government methodically wiped the place clean of mystery and faith, leaving only the golden Buddha statues. Where the shops once sold incense to devout grandmothers to burn at each mountainside shrine, they now sold toy tanks to tourists, and these noisy wind-up soldiers that crawled on their bellies and fired their little guns. The weird temple in the valley around back, the one that featured wild dioramas of all the gory ways our transitory human flesh can die? Levelled and gone. A sign at the bus stop now declares the entire mountaintop a region of geological significance, as if humans ever climbed a mountain for the stones beneath our feet. Now DOC ain't the PRC. No one's trying to kill the vibe at Powell or any other hut. There are now lights at some 40 huts across the country, including many along the Great Walks. Shan Baththana, DOC's director of asset management, notes that the department aims to serve a wide variety of folks. 'Many people value getting off the grid and into nature, while others, appreciate a few modern comforts,' he said in an emailed statement. 'DOC recognises the need to provide a range of hut experiences for different users.' The lights are indeed practical and safe. We were only five overnight trampers at Powell this trip; a 32-person dinner rush up there is surely tricky in the winter dark. Maybe the lights made the solo French woman at the next table feel a couple of clicks safer around two dads and a pint of Jameson? If anyone got hurt, we could've done surgery on the table, at least until the timer switch popped off. The lights only ran for half an hour. Every time they blinked out, one of us hopped up to punch the button again, quick as mice in a lab. Something's been lost here. But what? Consider the sacredness of the hut church, in five points nailed to the door: Being out in nature. Powell Hut is four hours' walk from the road – entry level stuff in New Zealand – but there are misty goblin forests up there, plus birds, mud, trees I can't name and unspeakable winds that clean out your soul. Place. Each hut is a hand-drawn X on the topo map, a set of coordinates lovingly selected for shelter and unique upon the Earth. We say their names like prayers: Blue Range, Atiwhakatu, Totara Flats. Disconnection. The cell signal at Powell is blazing, better than wide swaths of the valley below. But to call my kids from the hut to say goodnight was so obviously wrong, I never considered it. Austerit y. A wooden box makes a fine home. Walk through the mist to the drop toilet. Carry three tablespoons of peanut butter up 1,000 vertical meters to eat it at an empty wooden table, and it tastes like gold. Community. That solo night at Powell: 31 empty bunks, a candle in a stranger's gin bottle, and an Intentions Book scrawled with months of my fellow trampers' weather reports. I never for a second felt alone. Electric lights dim most of these, in their way. They ain't strictly natural. They look like any old Warehouse. We're still disconnected, I suppose, but they certainly shrink austerity in the name of 'comfort.' But I submit that it's community where the lights hit us hardest. It shouldn't make a difference, right? Plenty of humans worship under shitty overhead lights. Jenny grew up Lutheran, a tradition that sees candles as papist frippery; my own Episcopalian stock adores the high-church cosplay of incense and fire. Whatever your aesthetics, it's still just folks worshipping in a designated room. A recent New York Times piece tried to get to the bottom of Finland's allegedly world-leading happiness. The reporter's most convincing answer was that Finns spend a staggering amount of time sitting around naked together in spare wooden boxes. Saunas, like huts, are austere, collective shelters from the dark and cold. You've left your standard comforts and protections outside the door or down at the trailhead. You are weakened by the heat or the hike. You are vulnerable. Merely by walking in the door, you place your trust in the neighbour beside you, whether they're naked or muddy and wiped from a 10km slog. In a candle-lit hut, then, our collective trust is heightened – it's pretty, it's dark, it's romantic. What is romance but opening yourself to the unknown? Turn on the lights, and the need for that trust ebbs away, along with the warmth of the trust itself. Electric lights in a hut are togs in a sauna. They eliminate the dark, mysterious corners of the self through which we disappear into the wider human spirit. To light a hut like a bus station is to foreclose this union, and instead remind us how desperately we try to separate ourselves: if you see something, say something. Now, New Zealand's a pretty trusting place, as they go. Far more so than America these days, it pains me to say. But even here, there's plenty of this twitch waiting in our lonesome, crowded lives below. We have come to the hut to leave it all behind – all but each other. Turn out the lights. Let us worship together in the dark. We ate some noodles, yawned over the cards, then hauled off to our bunks. I couldn't sleep. Past midnight, the wind came up. Just a song at first, then a great thumping train of westerlies rattling through the mountain night. The mighty Powell Hut began to tremble. No big deal. Just a loving handshake from the void. The hut wasn't going to tumble down the mountain with all of us inside. Not this time. Come the grey morning, we wiped the benches down, packed our wet socks, and set out into the rain once more.
