Two Go Wild in Hokitika
Trip Start
Oct 15, 2007
1
70
97
Trip End
Aug 24, 2008
Hokitika,
South Island,
New Zealand
Saturday, March 8, 2008
We got to Hokitika area earlier than we had originally anticipated and checked out a DOC site a little way south of the town. It was full to bursting, so we decided to stop off in Hokitika to see if we could collect the tickets we had pre-booked, then try another DOC site further north.
In Hokitika, the festivities had already started, so after parking and finding the tourist information office closed, we had a bit of a look round the various food stalls, craft stalls and live bands around the place. We had booked into a campsite for the following night, but decided to see if we could camp there tonight as well.
It took a while to find the site (the local Rugby League club - didn't think it would be that well hidden), but once we did, we were able to pay for another night so set up camp next to a small orange van and a couple of tents. We said a brief hello to the neighbours and headed into town to see what was going on and get a bite to eat.
The town centre activities seemed to be winding down as we arrived, which was a little disappointing. We had a look around the remaining stalls, ate bacon butties, and Jacob failed to climb a wobbly rope ladder to retrieve dollar notes pinned at the top. We also watched some of the live music, including Fred and Rose, the fabulously stern and serious Country and Western duo. Stetsons, collar-tips, "O, Lonesome Me" type Country and Western. Rose in particular looked better suited to life as a maths teacher - she definitely had the "no messing about at the back" glare down to a tee.
The excitements of Hokitika town centre exhausted, we bought some beers from a nearby off licence. Refusing the bags as we usually do (neither of us appreciate being given plastic bags which we don't need), we were told that we had to have the crate in a bag, as it was illegal to carry alcohol through the town centre uncovered during the festival. 'Not Causing Trouble' seemed to be the goal of the law, but why this extended to having to have two bags tied around your sealed crate of unopened bottles was a little beyond us.
Indeed, a policeman was arresting a young guy for drinking in the street as we walked back to the campsite. He asked us where we were going, told us to keep our beers under wraps until we got back to the van and bid us a good evening. The rules in force for the festival also included 'no freedom camping', which theoretically meant that vans and tents camping outside official sites would be moved on, although the streets seemed to be full of campervans. One set of campers had even brought a sofa, which they were sitting on in the street.
Back at the van, we ended up chatting to our neighbours with the orange van and the tents. A dreadlocked guy called Caz and his wife Bianca were the owners of the van and were travelling around New Zealand with their baby daughter Nyah. The tents were occupied by their friend Neil and Jo, an Irish hitch hiker they had collected on their way to the festival.
They (apart from Jo) were from Jersey. Jacob mentioned that last time he met someone from there, she knew the only Jerseyman he knew. They also knew him. "John Small? Really big bloke? Plays basketball? Works as a customs officer? Yeah, I know John..." Bit odd, but always nice when these little connections crop up. Meanwhile, back at the ranch...
The festival we were attending, for those of you who may have forgotten, was the Wild Foods Festival. It sold itself on the fact that you could try all sorts of foods that don't usually make the average menu, such as grubs, grasshoppers, organs and meats from more exotic animals such as crocodiles and ostriches.
It came as a bit of a surprise to us, then, that Neil was the only one of this group who actually ate meat. Caz, Bianca and Nyah were vegetarian and Jo was vegan. They were hoping for a lot of wild fruit and vegetables. Hmm. Neil and Jo didn't have tickets but were hoping to get them on the gate. When we had booked our tickets, the site had been quite clear that all tickets sell out very quickly, so we didn't hold out much hope for them getting in.
The following morning, we were up early and had a quick breakfast before heading over to the tourist information office to collect our tickets. The festival kicked off at ten and we went in at around ten thirty. At the gate, the people who were collecting tickets also had stacks and stacks of unsold tickets for sale. It seems that the popularity of the festival had been somewhat overestimated by the organisers.
Once inside, the 'wild' stuff started well: there was a tent by the entrance, outside which were two burly men with axes splitting wood and collecting the huhu grubs from their burrows inside. Huhu grubs are probably better known internationally by their Australian name - witchetty grubs. For those of you not familiar with them by either name, they're basically enormous maggots. We kicked off our 'wild' day in style and tried them live.
They do not, as everybody claims, taste like peanut butter. There is a nuttiness about them, but it's more akin to a cross between almonds and cashews, with a watery sort of texture and a slight chewiness. They don't carry on wriggling. They don't scream. They're just nutty chewy watery things.
We also tried them barbecued, which concentrated the flavour and reduced the wateriness. Quite nice, actually.
There were a lot of people who seemed to be extremely squeamish about the whole thing.
"Oooh, no, I couldn't eat anything like that!"
What, precisely, are you doing here? What were you expecting a festival of wild foods to involve?
To be honest, it seemed that these types were pretty well catered for. We had arrived at ten thirty, we could easily have covered all of the 'wild' stuff by ten forty five. There were loads of stalls offering "WILD! bacon sandwiches" and "WILD! venison casserole", but very little that you couldn't find in a deli or a slightly more interesting restaurant.
We wandered for a while, trying a few more bits and pieces. We tried to space them out so as to fill the day up a bit more, but we were really running out of stuff to do by about two o'clock.
For those who haven't gone all silly at the description of the huhu grubs, we also tried satay grasshoppers, beer battered beetles with sweet chilli sauce, worm sushi and worm dukkah (dukkah: roasted nuts, seeds and spices into which you dip oiled bread), ostrich pie, a kind of carpaccio of venison, grilled ostrich, horse burgers, crocodile, kangaroo and "mountain oysters" (sheep's testicles). 'Wild' sheep?
For those of you who have gone silly...sorry. Should have warned you to skip ahead really. Oh well.
We watched Dean Vegas the Elvis impersonator for a while, but as he was to be performing at the evening's party, to which we had tickets, we figured we'd leave him till later. Yes, we were eking out the entertainment to the extent that we were saving the Elvis impersonator till later.
We also saw Rose, of 'Fred and Rose' Country and Western fame. Turns out she's not a maths teacher, she's a fire safety inspector. Maybe she teaches maths as a sideline.
A couple of very heavily made up 'ladies' (y'know the type - orange foundation tidemarks round the neck, that sort of thing) calling themselves the Teppanyaki Queens were running a Wildfoods Cooking Demonstration. Teppanyaki is the flamboyant, chuck things around with gleaming metal spatulas on a huge griddle type of cooking you sometimes see in Japanese restaurants. A sort of cocktail bar meets barbecue, if you like.
This pair were essentially plugging their catering business, dropping in a mention of their availability whenever they weren't giving a terrible, uninformative commentary on what they were doing or shouting "Yeah! Whoo! Awesome!" They cooked some venison and some squid. They mentioned the farms from which the venison had come. Farms. The Hokitika WILD Foods festival. Squid...well, yes, it may have been wild, but that's not really the point is it? Tinned tuna is wild, but hardly the stuff of such a festival.
Their recipe ideas, though fairly middle-of-the-road, sounded pleasant enough, but cooking a big pile of chopped garlic till it's almost burnt then slinging it in with your meat at the last second imparts flavour...how, exactly? There's only so many times flambéing with flavoured vodka (flavoured with what?) and spinning a large peppermill around your hand can be used to disguise your lack of repertoire, ability or charisma. That number of times may, if we're being charitable, be one.
We bumped into the vegans from the campsite, who sheepishly admitted that there wasn't anything there for them. Jo complained about how cruel all this killing, cooking and eating of living creatures was.
You are a member of an omnivorous species. If you choose not to avail yourself of the rich variety of provender nature has seen fit to grant you, then that's up to you. Please do not feel the need to tell other people that animals at the top of the food chain eating wild, free-range or organically farmed animals is 'cruel'. Intensive factory farming - OK, cruel could be a reasonable description of that. Wild? No, sorry, that's just the way nature intended, and human constructs such as cruelty aren't really relevant. Besides, your eating all those beans has some fairly cruel implications for the rest of us...
She was right though, there wasn't really anything of interest there for them, largely because there wasn't much of any interest there at all. A lot of people seemed to be making a big show of having a "Whoo, WILD time, yeah, party!", but that's all it was. There were a lot of the trappings of a festival - groups of friends dressed up in silly costumes, local 'characters' accosting strangers and being embarrassing, but no real main event. A few side shows, but no big top. Even the food, supposedly the star attraction, was just like the catering stalls at any other festival - unusual bits of barbecued meat in buns - just without the backdrop of any real festivities. Oh, and it rained.
We gave up.
Back at the van, we drank beer, ate cake, played cards and generally had a much better time than we had done in the field. If we'd have just stopped off in Hokitika for the festival it wouldn't have seemed quite so galling, but because of the timing, we'd had to drive many, many miles back across New Zealand to get there. Hrummph.
We tried to make the best of a bad job, so went out and threw ourselves at the evening do. A three piece rock 'n' roll band were well into their set, doing a pretty good job of getting the crowd going as we arrived. They finished, and we popped out to the final remnants of the food stalls: an Indian family serving venison curry - sorry, WILD venison curry - opposite the beer tent. Beer, curry, a winning combination.
Kiwis, we had by now discovered, are not really big on spicy food. Despite having realised this, the venison curry was still a tremendous disappointment. It was meat in gravy. The spiciest ingredient was probably pepper. Oh deer.
Elvis came on, and rather than stand around bitching about what a shambolic waste of time and money everything had been, we danced. Danced like nutters. Quite fun actually.
We also speculated about the range of kitchenware The King may have put his name to had he survived. The 'Love Meat Tender-iser', 'Return to Blender' (with the coffee-lover's 'Suspicious Grinds' attachment), 'Hunk o' Hunk o' Oven-Glove', 'Blue Suede Spoons' and 'Jailhouse Wok'. This may seem a tad peculiar (although probably not to our families), but there is only so much entertainment we can be expected to derive from the day's second viewing of the same Elvis impersonator.
The Little Green Men (an 'Irish' band in kilts) rounded the night off, with covers of popular rock classics, most of which we knew and to which we bounced around. Well, Jacob bounced, Kirsty's ankle was none too pleased, so she was more hopping than bouncing.
A few questionable renditions of Irish classics (an almost unrecognisable double-time version of Whiskey in the Jar) were thrown in for good measure. Get a few jars of ale down them and any given crowd thinks they're Irish, so the atmosphere was pretty good.
The day salvaged a little through the medium of booze and dancing, we returned to our WILD van on the WILD rugby pitch for some WILD sleep before setting off on our WILD journey towards...you get the picture. We went to bed.
This is Jacob and Kirsty Thrall, reporting from the Mild Foods Festival, Hokitika, New Zealand. Back to you in the studio.
