Holiday for Susan

Another flight from Sydney is in at Auckland Airport who's on board? Salesman on expense accounts, grannies on family business (and remember every granny as someone's mother-in-law) and of course visitors from abroad. It's one of these visitors who concerns us.

Name: Susan Vaughan

Age: 22

Address: Sydney

Purpose of visit: To tour the country with a New Zealand friend, Lorraine Clarke.

It's quite a moment, the moment of leaving a ship, a train, or an airplane.

If you're expecting a friend to meet you there's always the fleeting fear they might not turn up.

No worries this time.

Lorraine is here and Susan can consider her holiday really begun.

Fifty years ago there wouldn't have been many young ladies who'd hire a horse and buggy and set off to see the world. Today any amount of young ladies do just that.

The buggy is now a car or, even an airplane, and that's the reason for all these globe-trotting young women.

Travel's so much easier, so much more fun these days.

So into the city of Auckland. This is something young Edwardians did do. Like our young ladies they enjoyed taking tea in the Rose Garden. However, let's forget the past for we're in Queen Street, an entirely modern thoroughfare.

Last-minute shopping for the things a girl needs on tour, and the first of many swims she'll have in New Zealand, round out Susan's brief stay in Auckland. After all, the place is a city and this young Sydney-sider wants to see the wide-open spaces.

Lorraine has plotted the course with just this in mind, first by Road to Rotorua, Wairakei, and Waitomo, a bubbling area of natural porridge pots, miniature volcanoes, and long underground walks.

Back to Auckland to catch a plane to Wellington. A 400 mile trip in 90 minutes. A one night stopover in the capital city.

Then across to Nelson in the South Island.

Christchurch is next.

Stepping off place for tours into the mountains, where you can rough it in the luxury of the Hermitage Hotel.

Down to Queenstown.

With maybe a side trip to Milford Sound.

Through Southland to the city of Invercargill, there to take off for Christchurch.

From Christchurch, back home.

First stop Rotorua.

Anglers please keep their seats, these aquarium beauties are only for looking at. But in the local rivers can be caught any number of trout just like them.

Women, of course, won't take fishing seriously.

But they seem to enjoy it just the same.

More feminine than angling is sightseeing. With its gentle perambulations past such fancy scenes as the bridal veil and the champagne pool.

The steam from Rotorua's geysers tumbles happily upwards with never a care. But the steam at Wairakei is serious hard-working steam, busy being turned into electricity.

If holidaymakers find all this regulated energy overwhelming, the golf course is next door.

Alright, so it's trick photography.

While winter visitors might not be tempted to sunbathe, no one need ever be cold at Wairakei.

The warm mineral water flowing into the hotel pools eases the aching muscles of businessmen, clears the early morning head, and gives strength for the coming day.

We'll leave the gentlemen happily collapsed in the sunshine and venture underground.

Waitomo caves, last side trip for the girls before they fly south, under colored lights the acres of limestone seem to breathe ice and fire.

Topside again and ready to go even higher.

Goodbye to Auckland, and the thermal regions, and goodbye to the north of the North Island.

Wellington's an hour and a half away, and beyond Wellington the South Island.

Meet David Thomas from Auckland. He's one of those incurable shutter-bugs who photographs everything in sight, even when flying 20,000 feet above the scenery. Oh you may laugh girls, but David won't have to buy postcards to show people where he's been.

He'll just spend five times the money on films. Not that it'll be wasted.

There are many types of natural beauties worth photographing.

Below is Mount Ruapehu, the roof of the North Island, and soon the flight will be over. Wellington, and the passengers go their separate ways. Who knows he may meet his pin-up girl again someday.

For Susan and Lorraine one night to spend in the capital city. Time for a night out, a capital dinner with all the trimmings...

... and a toast to whatever Nelson and the South Island may bring tomorrow.

Nelson is thirty minutes by air from Wellington and its climate is grand.

Visitors are moved to prance about on the beach and eat their lunches outdoors, never heeding the sand in their ice cream, and in Nelson you meet the nicest people, as if you hadn't guessed.

Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl, the classic formula. But what a pleasant place to find her in.

The summer days go lazily by.

There's plenty of time to get better acquainted.

Plenty to do, plenty to see.

It's a good tobacco picking machine but it'll never fly. Idyllic days indeed, but even here they can't last forever. Always there comes the time to move on.

No matter, addresses have been exchanged and promises to write. While David hopes to be in Christchurch before Susan leaves the country.

Right now leaving New Zealand is something Susan doesn't want to think about at all. This we hope is only a temporary farewell. After all it's a small country so that's all it need be.

The city of Christchurch is said by some to be a piece of Old England shifted holus-bolus to the South Pacific. Its citizens do their best to encourage the myth but give the game away by getting excited over the same things as every other New Zealander.

The people in this crowd all have one idea: they are convinced they have the winner for the next race. And so keen are New Zealanders about horse racing that most of them won't mind much being proved wrong. Win or lose, a day on a Christchurch racecourse is fun. The horses are always in good shape even if the punters pockets aren't. Triumphantly, Susan leaves the payout window. Oh she'll crow when she writes to David about this. It's not a big win that'll be enough for a couple of extra days at the Hermitage Hotel.

Up into the high country now, making for the mountains, the Southern Alps. In the distance Mount Cook, New Zealand's highest peak. At the foot of the mountain is an oasis of civilization: The Hermitage. Travelers staying here can frolic up and down the snowy slopes all day. Safe in the knowledge that in the evening they'll have all the creature comforts a good hotel can offer. They're really having the best of two worlds.

The hotel's landing strip couldn't be mistaken for London Airport, but efficient services operate in and out.

From here the ski planes takeoff to deposit tourists on the glaciers and bring them down again when they've been sufficiently awed by all that ice and snow.

The ease with which the ski planes are flown around the mountains is amazing.

The pilots know the glaciers as well as a farmer knows his fields.

So perhaps they're blasé about it, but passengers, even those who've been up here many times, get a tremendous sense of exhilaration from the trip.

Not every visitor to the South Island has time to travel to the Hermitage. Such people needn't miss out on enjoying the southern alps.

Join a long range tourist flight at Christchurch Airport and the scenery is all yours. The white walls slip away under the aircraft, and we really must rejoin the ladies below. We find them in Queenstown.

Queenstown is a place with something about it, and that's proved by the fact that visitors return again and again. Its charm might lie in the mountains, the lake named Wakatipu, the climate, or a heady combination of all three.

In winter even the most ardent skiers take a day off to make a trip on the lake steamer. She sails along like a stately mother duck pursued at times by racy offspring.

One very happy girl on board the speed launch is our friend Susan. She received a letter this morning. That makes five since she left Nelson, and she knows there'll be another one waiting tomorrow morning at the hotel in Milford Sound. Susan's now just as interested in the mail delivery as she isn't seeing the rest of the country.

A rental car will take the girls from Queenstown into Milford Sound, and finally down to Invercargill.

Milford is the best known of any New Zealand sound, and lies beyond the southern lakes of Te Anau and Manapouri. The hotel standing at the head of the sound seems remote, cut off from the rest of the world. Yet the number of travelers who reach it is surprising. Apart from coming in by road, people can walk in over the Milford Track, and the great number do come in by air.

Or from the open sea,12 miles away, make their visit on board a ship.

All this makes the sound sound very crowded, but on the other hand it is very large.

Sheep have all the time in the world to stand and stare.

Susan's pressing on to catch the plane from Invercargill. Is Susan sure he'll be in Christchurch? No she's not, but she's taking no chances. This time tomorrow Lorraine will be back in Auckland and Susan will be looking down on the Tasman Sea.

She'll have many things to remember:

The boiling world of Rotorua...

....the stillness up in the mountains...

...backing the winner at the races...

...and those sunny happy days at Nelson.

Zero hour approaches and there's still no sign of David.

"Perhaps he won't come?"

"Oh yes he will!"

"But you never know with men."

If that's what Susan's thinking she's doing a fine feminine job of not sharing it.

Her luggage has been checked in, she has a seat number, nothing to do now but wait. And the waiting is not in vain.

Lorraine as an interested observer never doubted for a moment that David would be here, and she silently rehearsed her tactful exit line for the last hour.

She simply must go and buy a magazine.

A chance photograph.

An accidental meeting.

An exchange of letters.

Happy days together.

These sometimes are the things that lead to a proposal.

After she leaves New Zealand this afternoon perhaps it'll be a very short time before Susan is back again...

...for a long long stay

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