Sam Blair is used to the coolness of a winter night time in Lake Tekapo. Standing within the chilly is a part of his job.
“Milky Approach season runs Could via ’til, like, October, for the world. For us in New Zealand, that is our winter.
“It is the longest and darkest nights, so not solely is it the perfect time of 12 months to have a look at the Milky Approach… the Southern Hemisphere is the perfect a part of the world to do it,” he advised RNZ’s Nation Life programme.
Lake Tekapo within the Mackenzie Basin enjoys significantly starry night time skies – a results of each its local weather and efforts within the city to scale back gentle air pollution, which earned it a Darkish Sky qualification in 2012.
The world makes for excellent stargazing, which is why Blair finds himself establishing telescopes on Balmoral Station, a excessive nation farm lower than 10 minutes from the township.
He runs guided excursions of the skies via Silver River Stargazing, one arm of agritourism enterprise Go Tekapo.
Stargazing is one piece of the farm-diversification puzzle for Go Tekapo, owned by Steve Berge.
It operates a number of agritourism experiences over Balmoral and Mt Hay Stations, merino and beef farms owned by the Simpson household.
The enterprise started about 10 years in the past.
“This wasn’t strategically deliberate, it was extra out of farming wasn’t doing so nicely,” Berge mentioned. “We thought, ‘How else can we generate profits from the land?'”
The household started with constructing vacationer lodging, and when that did nicely, ventured into farm experiences.
“Mainly something that we are able to do on farm, or near farm, we’ll have a crack at.”
Horse-trekking, ATV rides, muster experiences and a petting zoo are amongt the sights supplied throughout the farms – all whereas they’re actively farmed.
Berge mentioned demand for the farm experiences has ramped up over the 4 years.
“There’s much more vacationers after Covid, and particularly the Chinese language market has grown considerably.”
The stargazing excursions are supplied in Japanese and Mandarin, in addition to English, to higher serve the vacationers reserving them, he mentioned.
“They are saying there are 1,000,000 vacationers a 12 months within the South Island, and a variety of them come to Lake Tekapo for its scenic magnificence.
“You lookup at Lake Tekapo, and all you see is mountains; you do not see excessive rise buildings such as you would in Switzerland, or a gondola going up a mountain.”
The farms themselves run 10,000 merino sheep and 600 cattle.
Berge mentioned farmers from different international locations usually attend the experiences to see whether or not they might begin agritourism companies on their very own land.
“I feel farming world wide, is fairly related. I feel the factor that strikes individuals right here is that pure, scenic magnificence.”
“I’ve lived right here for a very long time, however you continue to lookup on the stars and go ‘wow’.”
