Wildfoods Festival

The craziness has yet to let up. It seems that all people do during the week here apart from going to class, is plan what to do for the next weekend. A large portion of my friends spent this past week figuring out all the details in attending the Wildfoods Festival in Hokitika, which is on the west coast of the south island, but much farther north. We had to work out tickets, campsites, hostels, carrides... it all turned out to be worth it though.

I woke up before my classes on Thursday morning to get the rental car and rent a tent from Unipol, the recreation center here at Otago. I made it to my class right on time, and after Maori and Hinduism/Buddhism I came straight home to pack all my stuff together for the weekend. We eventually rounded up the kids for our car (myself, Alison, Garrett, Caroline, and Steve) and hit the road. We were actually one of the first cars to head out, so we had to figure out the path on our own. The plan was to drive to Wanaka to camp for the night, since it was about halfway to Hokitika. The only problem was that the day was looking pretty gloomy, and we didn't really know of anywhere to go once we were in Wanaka. We ended up calling about every hostel on our list and none of them had any openings. Luckily about 20 minutes before we ended up in Wanaka our friends in the car not too far behind us had found a place, and booked it for theirs and our car. We drove around trying to find it for a while, but eventually made it to the Albert Town Lodge.

Throwing all of our stuff down, the five of us ventured into the town in search of some food. We found a pretty classy outdoor pizza place called The Cow and chowed down. It was relaxing to sit down and have a meal after the drive, and was great the next morning to have leftovers also. Each of us grabbed a bottle of wine next door before heading back to the hostel. When we got back there we were greeted by our friends who had made our hostel reservation, and we all hung out for a little while before getting some sleep.

We woke up early the next morning to try to call to make a reservation to do a half-day hike of Franz Josef Glacier, which was on the way, but everything had already been booked. There was still a lot of driving to do anyway, and we were able to do it at our own pace instead of trying to make it to the hike on time. We ended up stopping at a bunch of different lookout points to take pictures, and we also stopped at both Franz Josef and Fox Glaciers to hike around ourselves for a while. We couldn't cross a river (that had been caused by the melting glacier) to actually hike up to the glacier itself, but we had a great time walking around there.

Heading back to the car, we finished up the rest of the scenic drive and finally made it to Hokitika, where the festival was being held. Some of our friends were already there, as a bunch of us had all reserved the same campsite. Our campsite, "Beach Street," was literally right next to the beach... felt a little similar to the weekend before at Long Beach. By night there were tons of bonfires all up and down the beach, and everyone was just hanging around meeting new people and having a good time. Some of us tried to not make it so late of a night, and passed out in our tents to get some rest before eating some crazy stuff the next morning.

I woke up relatively early on Saturday morning and got all my stuff together, and got ready to head out to the festival. A group of us went and found where to get our pre-ordered tickets, and made it into the festival pretty early around 10:30. We'd been told that a lot of the really crazy stuff gets eaten early, so we had to get there in time for that. Going around to each of the venders, one of us would buy a small amount of something, and we'd all try it. It went like that for most of the day, just walking around and eating weird stuff! Throughout the day I tried: ostrich pie, eel, kangaroo, "rocky mountain oysters" (buffalo testicle), shark, grasshopper, cow udder, venison burgers, kava juice, a huge chunk of honeycomb, buffalo jerky, the quintessential Wildfoods huhu grub, and much more. That night was similar to the one before it, hanging out by the campfires on the beach.

The next day we headed out to get an early start on all the driving that we had. Before leaving, though, we stopped in town to get some authentic jade, from a shop run by a Maori couple who cut all the jade themselves. I got a pretty cool fish-hook design, which is supposed to represent "determination, strength, peace, prosperity and safe journey especially over water." We set out on the road which was another beautiful drive... this time we took a different route and went through Arthur's Pass. It's crazy how stunning New Zealand is, every drive that we took seemed amazing.

We got back to the flats around 7pm, ate food and relaxed. For the next couple of nights we took it easy and stuck to watching movies at night rather than going out, which was probably a good bet due to St. Patrick's Day last night. The complex at 480 Leith had another big party, which somehow had food paid for by the university. It was great having everyone decked out in green and having a good time, and add some good barbeque to the mix and it was another awesome night.

On my list of to-do's now are planning what to do this weekend (maybe a trip to Queenstown?), get fall break figured out (Fiji? Cook Islands?), and work on the possibility of buying a cheap car with some friends so we don't have to keep renting. We'll see what happens. And check the "My Pictures" link, there should be tons more photos up there.