Queenstown charitable trust Mana Tāhuna has started running local Māori cultural tours.

Partnering with Alpine Luxury Tours, it is offering three components which small groups can pick and choose from — a Māori welcome or mihi whakatau along with a kapa haka performance, native tree-planting and cultural storytelling, and a hangi lunch.

“I mean, there’s nothing really in Queenstown representative of our Māori culture, and that’s something guests really want,” Mana Tāhuna chief executive/tumu whakarae Mike Rewi says.

“You know, guests go to Rotorua and they come here and expect to see similar kinds of cultural experiences, and it’s really lacking in that space.”

He says the tour brings together components they have already been offering, such as formally welcoming conference guests and providing hangi-prepared food through their Hangi Master subsidiary.

“And then it came into, ‘can these conference delegates come into the environment and give back to nature?’

“They’ll go to somewhere within the Waiwhakaata Lake Hayes catchment and they’ll have a chat to [Mana Tāhuna founder] Darren [Rewi] and our ecologist around the native plants we’re planting and why it’s good for the environment.

“Darren will go into a bit of the Māori culture and our creation story which they really love — they want to learn some history around the place and what it was like here before Europeans.”

Mike, Darren’s son, says Mana Tāhuna is trying to be fully independent from funding streams in the next three years.

“We’re well on our way to do that with our commercial planting, but this is something that’ll add, hopefully, another 30% of revenue into it.”

— PHILIP CHANDLER