Our thoughts are with the families, communities and businesses in and around Christchurch on New Zealand's South Island. As you will all know by now, a large magnitude 7.1 earthquake hit Christchurch and Canterbury a few days ago, causing extensive damage and destruction.  The best thing we can all do now to help our friends in "The Garden City" Christchurch is to promote visitors to come and visit, thereby helping to rebuild the local economy and assist our tourism colleagues in these difficult times! We are also considering several options for raising funds to further support our friends and colleagues to help them get back on their feet. We have also decided that good news from New Zealand has to be a good thing and that is why we have decided to send out this newsletter which we prepared last week:

Ceillhe, Neill and Danica Matariki Sperath from TIME Unlimited Tours will fly out to the United States this evening to attend the award ceremony for the global tourism award that our company recently won in conjunction with the United Nations. We will attend the award presentation to TIME Unlimited Tours and the other award-winner from Lapland in Sweden the day after tomorrow Friday 10th September 2010.

Of course we will also take our beautiful baby daughter Danica Matariki with us too! The award presentation ceremony will take place at the Ecotourism and Sustainable Tourism Conference (ESTC) in Portland, Oregon. The ESTC is North America’s largest Ecotourism Conference. We will return to Auckland a few days after the ceremony.

TIME Unlimited Tours recently won the public vote section of the Global Indigenous Tourism and Biodiversity Website Award 2010 with a huge margin ahead of all other applicants, receiving 48.2% of all votes cast worldwide. The 2nd and 3rd-placed organisations achieved 21.1% and 9.8% respectively of votes cast.

We would like to again sincerely thank all who believed in and voted for us!