To the world at large New Zealand is known—if known at all—as the place par excellence for the production of butter and cheese, sheep and wool. These products, steadily pouring through the principal British and certain foreign marts, command attention to the country of their origin amongst a large body of buyers.

But the tourist attractions of the country are not exportable even in sample quantities. They are dependent for their effective appeal to overseas people upon publicity and salesmanship of a more subtle kind than need be applied to goods which potential customers can see, handle, or compare, upon a butcher's hook or a grocer's counter.

The comparative isolation of New Zealand is a handicap for tourist-attracting purposes until the idea can be driven home to the minds of the steadily increasing array of health and pleasure seeking travellers that this country is worthy of their special attention. Once reached, it has within its own shores, a unique and all-embracing range of the best of everything that elsewhere can be found only in scattered sections.

Leaving out of account the usual showplaces of New Zealand—the big drawing-cards like the deep-sea fishing grounds of the Northern peninsula, the kauri and other indigenous forests, the wonder valley of the Wairakei geysers, the grand Chateau set in the great North Island Playground of National Park, Rotorua, the Maori treasure-trove of thermal activity, Waitomo of the glowing caves, the alpine delights of Mt. Cook-guarded Hermitage or the Fox and Franz Josef glaciers, and the wondrous beauty of the Southern Lakes—there are literally hundreds of other charming, though little-known places that openly invite the attention of those seeking the best in tourist travel.

Among these are such localities as Tarawera, on the Taupo-Napier road, where the warm, healing pool that often cures when all else fails, lies above an immense river-eroded amphitheatre of unexampled loveliness—nooks and corners spread all about that would make fortunes for their owners in countries less richly endowed with wealth of scenic grandeur.

To make New Zealand better known, to attract an increasing stream of visitors, must prove profitable to this country as well as to the visitors.

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But any appeal sent overseas for the purpose of augmenting this stream can only be effective if concentrated upon definite patches of territory. In view of the vast surface to be sown if the whole world is to be cultivated, a general broadcast from this little country must necessarily be too thin to be effective. Having chosen the territory upon which a concentrated stream of publicity and selling force is to be showered, the whole-hearted backing in New Zealand of those who will most directly benefit from tourist traffic—transport undertakings and hotels—becomes essential, in order to provide that personal interest in the success of the drive which alone can make expenditure and effort upon this objective produce the best results. Not many of our hotels can yet supply the palatial comfort found along the way of the world's main travel routes, but the fact that some already can, while others are steadily improving their general accommodation, equipment and service, gives assurance that when the big tourist movement develops towards New Zealand, the facilities for handling it will be satisfactory and adequate.