Bushwalk Australia

http://www.wildernessmag.co.nz/view/pag ... er-threat/

Save Fiordland and Otago Conservation Board has discovered that the Ngai Tahu would have a legal right to build a monorail or gondola in the Greenstone and Caples valleys if the Snowdon Forest monorail gets the go ahead.

Sure hope they won't regret a monorail like how Sydney has finally pulled it down.

well the irony is if the maori's exercise their right to build their own gondola or monorail if the snowden forest monorail goes ahead then they will be essentially competing with each other transporting people to milford sound and potentially financially cutting each others throats.. and increasing the chance of turning it into a white elephant, they will be private companies, if they go belly up they arent going to be around to remove the infrastructure....
the maori's were also going to fund the routeburn tunnel if it went ahead, i wonder in theory if the tunnel had gone ahead would the monorail people still have gone ahead given that they would have been going head to head with each other as well?
as it is the tunnel proposal would have been dragged through teh courts for a long time if the minister of conservation said yes... i'm not sure how much that will be the case with any of these monorail or gondola proposals

one of the reasons the minister declined the routeburn tunnel was the financial risk involved in building it, and the possibility that the developers would go bust and just leave a hole in the ground and a lot of tailings with no benefit, its the hardest rock in the world there were a lot of issues drilling the manapouri tunnel, the boring machine wore out its drilling head and broke down far more frequently than anticipated and drilled a lot slower than expected...

Saints preserve us! Imagine a monorail through here??

And just when I was getting prepared to emigrate to NZ after the all-too-predictable (and probably ghastly) election results on this side of the Tasman

cheers

Peter

all done with money given to the maori tribes from the govt as recompense for land lost during european colonisation,,
these were traditional maori routes for gathering greenstone and they want to turn it into disneyland today for the sake of money....
you can fly fish on the greenstone by permit guaranteeing you to be the only person on a specific 2km section of the river.... the permit are highly sought after, well as long as theres no monorail or gondola...

There are some strangely prescient comments about gondolas in John Cleese's 1979 spoof travel doco "Away From it All". You can find a youtube clip of it, but as I don't wish to contravene forum rules re. offensive content, I won't put the link here. If you're curious try searching on youtube for "John Cleese gondolas" and then click on "Away from it all (1979) pt 2". The relevant bit comes from the 0.44 second mark onwards

... and the bit I can quote simply goes "sorry, but we need them like we need a hole in the head."

cheers

Peter

its not like they are just going to cross over the valley they are going to run the entire 30km length, and possibly onto the routeburn as well.... about as much sense as running a gondola through a cathedral.... doc wont' want it there they have invested a lot and are still investing in track infrastructure in that area. and this has the prospect of scaring the trampers off.