Cass Avery: Tourists find tragic flipside to magnificent local scenery

Opinion

When you tell people that Lonely Planet has just rated New Zealand the top travel destination for this year you can see the time lapse as their synapses struggle to cross the credibility gap. I mean I know it's a great wee place and all but, really, ya must be jokin'.

I have taken this fair land for granted my whole life.

I look at the foreshore when the sun is shattering light across the harbour and I see nothing but glare, I have motored out into the shadow of Mitre Peak and marvelled only at the number of sandfly bites I can count on one leg.

The barbecue is blowing smoke inland so I happily stand with my back to Ninety Mile Beach and when I'm on the Coromandel I wonder only what heinous sum the 1950s shacks on the coast are going for. I'm horrid. Shoot me.

I reek of contempt for the familiar. It's why I loathe bungy jumping and mud pools and souvenir-shop vials of stratified sand.

Everywhere you look it's a postcard, if only the people got out of the way. Because that's what the tourists are here for.

They have come for the nature. To photograph the nature; walk through the nature; air-condition-elevator-music-coach-ride through the nature; do sporty things extremely fast through the nature.

Lonely Planet has attributed our elevated tourist status to Lord of the Rings. Millions of people worldwide have seen and believed it.

But I wonder if Lord of the Rings could be considered false advertising? Some pictures were doctored.

If Middle Earth is what people want to see when they come to New Zealand, Lonely Planet should really have rated Weta Studios as the number one travel destination.

But come they will. This year there will be more than two million of them, with long shorts, Lord of the Rings location maps and money. And they need an infrastructure to support them.

For every tourist and their camera there needs to be a bed, three meals a day and ablutions.

They need to be looked after. And they, like millions of tourists before them, will experience the mountainous, perilous, marvellous disappointment that is our service industry.

The wash 'n' wear army of waiters and waitresses who lie in wait for tables of coach-shaped, weary tourists are the Orcs of our Middle Earth.

By and large, with the exception of a few handfuls of restaurant professionals, they are the worst possible face of the nation. Why? Because they don't care. They are badly paid and as dispensable as paper towels.

I once met a Canadian writer, who had worked for years as a chef while waiting for his poetry to improve, who eventually gave me one thing worth quoting - not something literary but still worth a mention.

He said: "People shouldn't do compulsory military training. They should do compulsory service industry work."

And I've got to hand it to him. There's something in that.

Pushing plates is amazing training for life. It's a really hard job to do well. You need extraordinary skill to manage the blender mix of attitudes and expectations that come at you. You also need amazing powers of memory and dexterity. You need a lot of knowledge, a bit of charm and you need to care.

I have met many departing tourists whose abiding memory isn't the sunset flame that sheets up the Franz Josef Glacier like fire on the Mountain of Doom, nor is it the extraordinary passage through the Lothlorien majesty of the Waipoua Forest.

Instead it was the waitress who served them the wrong meal in New Plymouth and then after they had started eating it, whisked it off them and tried to force it on to the people who had originally ordered it. Or it was the maitre d' who threw the tip back at a departing couple as they crossed the bifold threshold. If only I were making it up.

New Zealand is to the service industry what Stars in Your Eyes is to MTV. We are a sad imitation of a great idea.

Our service industry is a tragic flipside to the magnificent facade of New Zealand, the awesome scenic spectacle that was started by nature and finished by Weta.

And even though, in my state of visual ennui, I don't appreciate the landscape as much as I should, I care enough to want us not to destroy the dream entirely for the hordes destined to flock here.

If we can't back up the image with something a lot more impressive when it comes to service, we are going to send more than two million Tolkien-eyed tourists away this year knowing there is a dark cloud over Middle-earth - an evil that even the power of the Ring couldn't protect them from.