After a brief visit to Christchurch, I returned to Arthur's Pass for one night before continuing on to Hokitika for the Wild Foods Festival. As I've mentioned before, the West Coast is a particularly untamed part of New Zealand, both geographically and culturally. So there's hardly a better place for a festival that celebrates my kind of weirdness - the tastiest ways to consume the food provided by one's immediate surroundings.
Hokitika is not a large town, so its accommodation is stretched to the limit by this festival. I ended up camping in one of several specially designated sites for festival guests. As at New Year's in Queenstown, the camp site was a rugby field. Wild Foods has earned a reputation as a weekend of partying and costumes, which has unfortunately shrunk the importance of the food itself. But the overall atmosphere was friendly, and the food was still the highlight.
As I travel, I keep a mental list of unique foods that I've eaten - whale and puffin in Iceland, rabbit in Morocco, reindeer in Alaska, etc. I added some new ones to that list while at the Wild Foods Festival, including crocodile and kangaroo, which were both tasty. At the end, my main regret was that the festival only lasts one day.
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| The driftwood sign on Hokitika beach. |
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| Crocodile on the left, kangaroo on the right, human in the middle. |
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| Live huhu grubs, straight from the tree. |
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| Raw mountain oysters. |
