Oturehua
The township of Oturehua is in the Ida Valley of the Maniototo, in Central Otago, in the South Island of New Zealand. The settlement stands at 500 metres above sea level, some 25 kilometres from Ranfurly, to which it is connected by both road and the Otago Central Rail Trail long-distance walking track. The population was 112 residents at last count. The New Zealand Ministry for Culture and Heritage gives a translation of "place where the summer star stands still" for ''Ōturēhua''. History Oturehua lies beneath a Rough Ridge, a range of hills. The township was also called Rough Ridge until 1907. The area has changed little from its description in 1905 when it was described as good arable land, from which large crops are successfully raised. In 1905, the township comprised a post and telegraph office, a store, a hotel near the railway station, a school, coal pits and a flour mill. Of these, only the Gilchrist's General Store and the Oturehua Tavern remain. Features Ha ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ida Valley
The Ida Valley lies east of the Manuherikia Valley in Central Otago, New Zealand. At an altitude of around , the 40 km long flat and wide valley is a relatively dry region with cold winters and hot summers, much like the rest of Central Otago. The majority of agricultural production in the Ida Valley is lamb, including merino, and also stud cattle. The valley is named after thIdaburn Idaburn flows from Mount Ida in the Ida Range, through the northern section of the Ida Valley, breaks through Raggedy Ridge through the Poolburn Gorge and into Manuherikia River. The Idaburn is joined by the Pool Burn (which drains the southern section of the valley) shortly before entering the Poolburn Gorge. The largest settlement in the sparsely populated Ida Valley is Oturehua, a small village at the northern end. Other localities include "Moa Creek", "Poolburn", "Ida Valley" and "Idaburn" which are groups of a few houses and farms rather than villages. Poolburn is the locati ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bonspiels
A bonspiel is a curling tournament, consisting of several games, often held on a weekend. Until the 20th century most bonspiels were held outdoors, on a frozen freshwater loch. Today almost all bonspiels are held indoors on specially prepared artificial ice. Bonspiels in North America Canada Curling Canada, formerly known as the Canadian Curling Association, is the national governing body of the sport in Canada. While bonspiels originated in Scotland, the most notable competitive curling tournament in the world nowadays is the Canadian Men's Curling Championship, The Brier. For many Canadians, this tournament equals or nearly equals the importance of the Olympics and the World Curling Championship. The Canadian Women's Curling Championship is called the Scotties Tournament of Hearts. Several Cashspiels are played in Canada every year, with the most important cashspiels being part of the World Curling Tour (WCT). Many local curling clubs and other organizations in Canada also hos ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Central Otago
Central Otago is located in the inland part of the Otago region in the South Island of New Zealand. The motto for the area is "A World of Difference". The area is dominated by mountain ranges and the upper reaches of the Clutha River and tributaries. The wide flat plateau of the Maniototo which lies between the upper reaches of the Taieri River and the Clutha's northern tributary the Manuherikia River, Manuherikia is also part of Central Otago. Characterised by cold winters and hot, dry summers, the area is only lightly populated. First significant European occupation came with the discovery of gold at Gabriel's Gully near Lawrence, New Zealand, Lawrence in 1861, which led to the Central Otago goldrush. Other towns and villages include Alexandra, New Zealand, Alexandra, Bannockburn, New Zealand, Bannockburn, Clyde, New Zealand, Clyde, Cromwell, New Zealand, Cromwell, Millers Flat, New Zealand, Millers Flat, Naseby, New Zealand, Naseby, Omakau, Ranfurly, New Zealand, Ranfurly, Rox ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Otago Central Rail Trail
The Otago Central Rail Trail is a 150-kilometre walking, cycling and horse riding track in the South Island of New Zealand. A pioneering project for New Zealand, the successful rail trail joined the New Zealand Cycle Trail umbrella organisation in 2012, having been one of the inspirations for it. The trail runs in an arc between Middlemarch and Clyde, along the route of the former Otago Central Railway. The trail has become a popular tourist attraction, with 10,000–12,000 users per year as a conservative estimate, and yearly (and ongoing) user increases for 6 out of the last 7 years (as of 2011). The trail is also accepted as being, by a large margin, the biggest non-farming economic factor in the Maniototo-Alexandra area. History The original railway line was completed at the turn of the 20th century, and provided a link between Central Otago and Dunedin until closure in 1990. The first 64 km from the junction with the Main South Line in Wingatui remain operational; the i ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Brass Monkey Motorcycle Rally
The Brass Monkey Motorcycle Rally is a motorcycle rally, rally held annually in Oturehua, Central Otago in New Zealand. The event is held every year over the weekend on which the Queen's Birthday#New_Zealand, Queen's birthday is celebrated, usually the first weekend of June. Organised by the Otago Motorcycle Club, the event attracts around 2,000 motorcycle enthusiasts from New Zealand and abroad. The rally gets its name from colloquial expression "Brass monkey (colloquial expression), cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey" because the venue is extremely cold, being within of Ophir, New Zealand, Ophir where New Zealand's coldest-ever temperature of -21.6 degrees Celsius was recorded. To warm up rally-goers, the site boasts what is described as 'the biggest bonfire ever'. 2010 was the event's 30th anniversary. Two and a half thousand riders pre-registered for the 40th and final event in 2021. The final event was intended to be run in 2019, but was postponed due to lo ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Maniototo
The Maniototo Plain, usually simply known as The Maniototo, is an elevated inland region in Otago, New Zealand. The region roughly surrounds the upper reaches of the Taieri River and the Manuherikia River. It is bounded by the Kakanui Range to the north and the Rock and Pillar Range to the southeast. It has a harsh, dry climate, ranging from over 30 °C in mid-summer to -15 °C in mid-winter. The region is sparsely populated, with the largest centres being Ranfurly, New Zealand, Ranfurly, Naseby, New Zealand, Naseby, Wedderburn and Oturehua. Part of the Canterbury-Otago tussock grasslands the land surrounding the plain is hilly, with many outcrops of rock which also break up the plain in places. During the 1860s the region was one of the sites of the Central Otago goldrush, and relics from that era can still be seen around the towns of Kyeburn, Naseby, New Zealand, Naseby, and Saint Bathans, New Zealand, St. Bathans. Sheep farming is the major source of income. The a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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New Zealand
New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island country by area, covering . New Zealand is about east of Australia across the Tasman Sea and south of the islands of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga. The country's varied topography and sharp mountain peaks, including the Southern Alps, owe much to tectonic uplift and volcanic eruptions. New Zealand's capital city is Wellington, and its most populous city is Auckland. The islands of New Zealand were the last large habitable land to be settled by humans. Between about 1280 and 1350, Polynesians began to settle in the islands and then developed a distinctive Māori culture. In 1642, the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman became the first European to sight and record New Zealand. In 1840, representatives of the United Kingdom and Māori chiefs ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ministry Of Education (New Zealand)
The Ministry of Education (Māori: ''Te Tāhuhu o te Mātauranga'') is the public service department of New Zealand charged with overseeing the New Zealand education system. The Ministry was formed in 1989 when the former, all-encompassing Department of Education was broken up into six separate agencies. History The Ministry was established as a result of the Picot task force set up by the Labour government in July 1987 to review the New Zealand education system. The members were Brian Picot, a businessman, Peter Ramsay, an associate professor of education at the University of Waikato, Margaret Rosemergy, a senior lecturer at the Wellington College of Education, Whetumarama Wereta, a social researcher at the Department of Maori Affairs and Colin Wise, another businessman. The task force was assisted by staff from the Treasury and the State Services Commission (SSC), who may have applied pressure on the task force to move towards eventually privatizing education, as had ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Curling
Curling is a sport in which players slide stones on a sheet of ice toward a target area which is segmented into four concentric circles. It is related to bowls, boules, and shuffleboard. Two teams, each with four players, take turns sliding heavy, polished granite stones, also called ''rocks'', across the ice ''curling sheet'' toward the ''house'', a circular target marked on the ice. Each team has eight stones, with each player throwing two. The purpose is to accumulate the highest score for a ''game''; points are scored for the stones resting closest to the centre of the house at the conclusion of each ''end'', which is completed when both teams have thrown all of their stones once. A game usually consists of eight or ten ends. The player can induce a curved path, described as ''curl'', by causing the stone to slowly rotate as it slides. The path of the rock may be further influenced by two sweepers with brooms or brushes, who accompany it as it slides down the sheet and sw ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Heritage New Zealand
Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga (initially the National Historic Places Trust and then, from 1963 to 2014, the New Zealand Historic Places Trust) ( mi, Pouhere Taonga) is a Crown entity with a membership of around 20,000 people that advocates for the protection of ancestral sites and heritage buildings in New Zealand. It was set up through the Historic Places Act 1954 with a mission to "...promote the identification, protection, preservation and conservation of the historical and cultural heritage of New Zealand" and is an autonomous Crown entity. Its current enabling legislation is the Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga Act 2014. History Charles Bathurst, 1st Viscount Bledisloe gifted the site where the Treaty of Waitangi was signed to the nation in 1932. The subsequent administration through the Waitangi Trust is sometimes seen as the beginning of formal heritage protection in New Zealand. Public discussion about heritage protection occurred in 1940 in conjunction with t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Antares
Antares is the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpius. It has the Bayer designation α Scorpii, which is Latinised to Alpha Scorpii. Often referred to as "the heart of the scorpion", Antares is flanked by σ Scorpii and τ Scorpii near the center of the constellation. Distinctly reddish when viewed with the naked eye, Antares is a slow irregular variable star that ranges in brightness from an apparent visual magnitude of +0.6 down to +1.6. It is on average the fifteenth-brightest star in the night sky. Classified as spectral type M1.5Iab-Ib, Antares is a red supergiant, a large evolved massive star and one of the largest stars visible to the naked eye. Its exact size remains uncertain, but if placed at the center of the Solar System, it would reach to somewhere between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Its mass is calculated to be around 12 times that of the Sun. Antares is the brightest and most evolved stellar member of the nearest OB association, the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Ranfurly, New Zealand
Ranfurly is a town in the Central Otago District of Otago, New Zealand. Located north of Dunedin, it lies in the dry rough plain of Maniototo at a moderately high altitude (around above sea level) close to a small tributary of the Taieri River. It operates as a service town for the local farming community. The town was formerly known as Eweburn, one of the "farmyard" names bestowed by former Otago Chief Surveyor John Turnbull Thomson on many small streams and locations in the district. The modern name honours the Fifth Earl of Ranfurly, who served as Governor of New Zealand (1897–1904) at the time of the extension of the Otago Central Railway to the area. Ranfurly is well known for its Art Deco buildings, such as its hotel and the milk bar. History During the Central Otago goldrush of the 1860s, several important deposits of the precious metal were found near Ranfurly, notably at Kyeburn and Naseby, close to the southwestern face of the Kakanui Range. After the gold-rush ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |