Editorial: Tourists must keep safe in Bay

Tourists need to be smart about where they choose to camp, say police.

Why is it that whenever misfortune strikes tourists to our region, we feel bad?

The reason is that we care. We care how our region is viewed abroad. We want people to love Hawke's Bay as we do. There is so much to enjoy in our region and we would prefer that outsiders viewed us the same way.

On our front page today, we have a story about police hunting two men who robbed a Chinese tourist, leaving her "shaken" and stripped of her belongings, at a Haumoana camping spot yesterday.

Detective Sergeant John McCarthy said the 31-year-old Chinese woman was sleeping in her car, parked overnight in Clive Grange Domain, when she woke to a torch light shining through her car windows. The woman thought the people standing outside were police, so she opened the car door. She was confronted by two men demanding her car keys.

The men then left with a quantity of cash, "an Apple Notebook and two cellphones - one a white iPhone 5 and the second a Chinese brand phone," Mr McCarthy said.

Police say the woman was not breaking the law by sleeping in her car at the domain as it is a public camping area.

This is a difficult one because we certainly don't want anyone, tourist or local being attacked and robbed, but we also need to educate tourists that sleeping in a lone vehicle in a domain is probably not the way to go.

The unfortunate thing is that people only remember that someone was robbed in Hawke's Bay, rather than what the circumstances were.

Hawke's Bay is a safe place, but like anywhere in the world there are times and places where one has to be careful.