A WORLD REPORT SPECIAL EDITION ON THE PACIFIC RIM : THE SOUTH RIM : Tourism : Main Attraction: Clean Air, Beauty : Asian visitors are flocking to New Zealand and Australia. Quality of life is said to be a key factor.

A group of 75 Taiwanese tourists obediently standing in line and wearing orange identification discs on their lapels gasped with simultaneous pleasure as a huge rainbow trout gracefully rose to the food being powdered onto the crystal-clear water below.

“New Zealand is so clean, so beautiful,” said Judy Chen, a banker from Taipei. “In Taiwan we have so much pollution. Here the air is clear. People are not crowded. It is so different from our home. I love it here.”

After half an hour appraising kiwi birds and deer, the group was back on two buses and thundering down the highway to geothermal springs 40 miles away that spew steam geysers high in the air.

Memories of New Zealand’s clean air and spectacular scenery have become the island country’s No. 1 export to Asia--if beauty can be measured as a commodity--perhaps not surprising given the density of most Asian cities, the traffic and the relentless pace.

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Chris Ryan, spokesman for New Zealand’s tourism board in Wellington, said the nation earned $2.58 billion in tourist revenues last year, its largest single source of foreign exchange. By the year 2000, New Zealanders expect to take in $6.2 billion in tourism.

The phenomenal growth in Asian tourism comes as a surprise, since it was almost nonexistent a decade ago. Tourist arrivals from Australia grew 7% last year, but arrivals from South Korea soared 110%, those from Thailand surged 54% and the number from Taiwan went up 38%.

“Asia is where all of our big growth is coming from,” Ryan said. “Asia as a group, more than any other group, appreciates the quality of life here.”

Australia is also enjoying an Asian tourist boom, with 1.2 million Asians among its foreign visitors last year. The Canberra government estimates that the industry, which saw the total number of all tourists more than triple to 3 million a year in the decade leading up to 1993, earns Australia about $7.8 billion a year and employs about 130,000.

Japan alone sent about 700,000 visitors to Australia last year, and that number is expected to rise to more than 1 million by the time Sydney hosts the Summer Olympic Games in 2000. Sydney is filled with Australian tour guides speaking Japanese and Korean.

While growth comes from Asia, both the New Zealand and Australian tourists industries are built on a foundation of longtime clients. The largest number of tourists to New Zealand come from Australia, and the second largest number going to Australia are New Zealanders. Britons and Americans rank high on both tourist lists.

Intriguingly, it is New Zealand’s lack of development over the past few decades, because of an economic stagnation that has now been reversed, that helps attract so many Asians to the green North Island and the mountainous South.

Hundreds of Japanese couples are paying thousands of dollars to be married in a beautiful 18th-Century church in the South Island city of Christchurch. They spend lavishly on tailor-made clothes just for the occasion, New Zealanders say, and then leave for their honeymoon in an open carriage drawn by a black steed. A lot of this Japanese honeymoon business used to go to Hawaii.

Christchurch is exploiting the nascent Japanese interest in New Zealand, and the nostalgia at its foundation, so heavily that the city restored a cable car system that was torn up in 1954 and discarded. It runs only a short distance, but is a photographic must.

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Anthony Chan, the co-owner of a Singapore tour company, said he has purchased a hotel in Queenstown, even farther south on the Alpine-like South Island, and is developing a second, as well as condominiums and a deer farm. Every hotel in Queenstown is owned by an Asian company.

“Singaporeans love New Zealand because of the vast open spaces; it’s not so busy,” Chan said. “We are kind of a paradox, a Chinese culture with English-speaking people. New Zealand is great value for the money.”

While both the New Zealand and Australian governments are enthusiastic over the success of their tourism campaigns in Asia, some dissent is beginning to emerge about the long-term consequences of mass tourism.

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Two weeks ago, the Queenstown city council engaged in a heated debate about the rapid development in the town, which has only 12,000 people.

“Some of our traditional markets don’t like the predominance of Asian tourists,” said David Bradford, Queenstown’s mayor.

While Americans and Europeans tend to arrive by car and spend a few days in town, he said, most Asian tours come in buses and spend only one night.