Stressed-out city executives looking to get away from it all have the chance to buy their own rural village in New Zealand, complete with a pub and population of 40.
Otira, a hamlet on the rainy west coast of New Zealand’s South Island, is on the market for $715,000.
Current owners Bill and Christine Hennah bought the rundown village in 1998 after passing through and “feeling sorry for it,” Christchurch-based newspaper the Press reported on Friday.
They paid $56,000 for the hotel or pub, school, railway station, town hall and 18 houses making up the village near the Arthur’s Pass National Park that dates back to 1923.
The village developed when the Otira railway tunnel was opened, and during its heyday was home to about 600 workers and their families.
But the couple, now aged in their 60s, say they no longer have the energy to run the hotel. They are asking $247,980 for the hotel or $715,000 for the whole lot.
“We need someone to build it up again. There is a lot of potential and opportunity,” Christine Hennah told The Press.
***
30 yrs jail for man who ate cellmate lungs
Rouen (France), June 25: A French convict who killed his cellmate and ate his lung was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Thursday.
Nicolas Cocaign and Thierry Baudry had a fight when Cocaign asked Baudry to wash his hands after he had used the toilet during the night of January 2, 2007. Cocaign strangled Baudry and cut open his chest with a razor blade.
Thinking it was the heart, Cocaign then ripped out a piece of Baudry’s lung and ate part of it raw before cooking the rest.
“What I did, I liked doing,” said Cocaign, 37, who has a shaved head and whose face is covered in tattoos. He will have to serve at least 20 years of his sentence.
—Reuters