Wild Weekend at Wildfoods

I've been getting sort of antsy staying in Christchurch when I know that there are so many adventures to have in Kiwi-land. I am pleased to say, though, that I've now had my first adventure, and man, what an experience it was. We went to Hokitika on the west coast to go to the Wildfoods Festival, an annual event that draws crowds of people from all over. Each year people dress up in costumes, and there are prizes for the best ones. It's like Halloween, but not in October and a little bit more fun. Our group dressed up at Batman & Robin and the villains. I was Harley Quinn, Sarah was Catwoman, and Shevelle was Poison Ivy, and our heroes were Zoe as Robin and Glyn as Batman; I'd say we looked pretty great.

 I had my first experience driving here, in a manual transmission car, on the wrong side of the road on the wrong side of the car. It didn't take me too long to get the hang of it, though my left hand is not so great at shifting. I hit the curb once, but once I learned to align myself with the center line rather than what I'm used to, I alleviated that problem. The other difficult part of the drive was all the one lane bridges. I've never seen or heard of a one way bridge, but again, I got the hang of those pretty quickly after lots of coaching from Glyn. The drive there was beautiful. Since Christchurch is on the east coast, and Hokitika is on the west coast, we got to drive through the mountains which was a gorgeous experience. We drove through Arthur's Pass which I would love to go back to, and saw many other breathtaking sights. We had a great time on the drive listening to music, talking, and drinking (not me-- I was driving). We left early Saturday morning, stopped along the way for some pictures, and arrived in Hokitika around 12:30, just in time for the festival, stayed overnight at a friend's house, and came back on Sunday afternoon.


Once we arrived in Hokitika, we got some food and water, and made our way to the festival where they had all sorts of crazy foods. It was fun to see everyone's costumes, people got pretty creative.

The first things we tried were crocodile (a little too chewy for my taste) and kangaroo (absolutely delicious).

Our next item was not quite so tasty; for $1 we could have a live huhu grub. They searched for them in their pile of wood, so at least we know they were fresh live huhu grubs. They were pretty small, but Sarah and I took different approaches of eating them; I swallowed mine whole (and now it's probably breeding in my stomach... ew) and Sarah bit the head off of hers and chewed it well. Judging by her face, it wasn't too good. On the bright side, now I can cross that one off my bucket list. The last crazy thing we tried was the Stallion Shot. If you really want to know what's in it, I'll gladly tell you, but you'll have to ask about it.

 We finished off the day dancing to live music, and then we went to get fish and chips. We didn't do much the rest of the night, though a lot of people went to the bars or to the after-party of the festival. Later that night, Sarah and I decided to cross another thing off the bucket list: skinny dipping in the sea. We could hear the ocean from where we were staying, so we decided to go find it and take a little swim. All in all, we had a wonderfully wild weekend full of great life experiences.