Radar: Ah, luxury. A gondola ride over the heritage

HUMOUR

It is the mentally impaired, the physically infirm, and the generally lethargic that I feel truly sorry for.

These people are taxpayers too, and it was with some of their tax money that the government has, over the years, purchased vast swathes of scenery.

The expense of these expanses is justified by the pleasure the great outdoors will bring to us all, to our children, to our children's children, to their children, and to the tourists, who our children's children's children will depend upon to survive after the loss of their traditional employment in farming, fishing and forestry.

But many of us are unable to utilise these areas of beauty.

I, for one, am incapable of wrestling a rucksack of scroggin around the wilderness. It's not the lugging, stumbling, orienteering, or the unpredictable weather that presents the problem.

It is more a deep-seated fear of using composting toilet facilities.

It is not the toilets themselves that cause the trepidation.

Rather it is the dreaded scrinch-scrunch of approaching Birkenstocks, (the jackboots of the new German invaders), marching inexorably closer to the fertiliser whare where I hover terrified, staring at the malfunctioning lock, awaiting the rough thrusting at the flimsy door, and the sound of the guttural apology.

Imagine my delight then upon hearing that Skyline Enterprises and Ngai Tahu are proposing one of the world's longest gondola rides across a beautiful landscape near Queenstown.

Predictably, many of the local folk nearly choked on their cud, while conservationists were green with apoplexy.

One even had the audacity to suggest that should someone wish to experience the joy of a gondola, then they could simply travel to Switzerland and do so there.

Perhaps, I thought, those excluded from the parks should do this, funded by the tax rebate they could claim for being barred from parks they helped buy.

This nation wasn't built on the spirit of locking up land for the exclusive use of the few.

Is it not a fundamental human right to appreciate the country we have paid for without having to struggle over it, drive around it, or view it on the Discovery Channel?

What invokes a greater sense of national pride than savouring the view from a gondola, sipping a cheeky breakfast champagne and ingesting organic bacon and free-range eggs?

What could instil more nature-inspired awe than to be cloaked in the clouds of cloying, but alarmingly alluring perfume, wafting off American women, as we listen to the soothing sounds of their husbands, celebrating the spectacle with such adroit phrases as "Wow" and "Gee" and "Where's the can?"

And what could be more touching than the glee in the eyes of the mentally impaired, the physically infirm, and the generally lethargic as they drool their appreciation of the vista.

If we are not careful, and the preservationists prevail, none of us will be able to see the woods for their pleas.