I drove over to Hokitika on the West Coast with about 20 of my friends from uni for the Wildfoods festival March 7-9. The drive over through Arthur's Pass was absolutely gorgeous. Steep, forested mountains, with waterfalls everywhere...even going over top the road!
We didn't have a campsite lined up, but found a perfect one up on a hill. It used to be an psychiatric hospital, which was a little creepy, but luckily we didn't find that out until the morning we were leaving. We had a great view, and we also discovered that at the bottom of the hill was a cave/depression that had glow worms (little worms that glow in the dark!) in it! I think it was one of the coolest things I've seen here. It looked like you were looking at the stars, but sideways. We were also just a couple of blocks away from the ocean...we went to the beach both nights, and ended up stumbling across fires that had been abandoned to burn down, so we built them back up into raging bonfires. Sitting around these fires at night with friends, listening to the waves crash, and looking up at the incredible blanket of stars above us was definitely my favorite part of the weekend.
The festival itself was still a blast though. Apparently you are supposed to dress up (we missed this memo), and some of the costumes were crazy. The food was even wilder though...huhu grubs, wasp larvae on ice cream, tree, live grasshopper, mountain oysters, kava juice (a muscle relaxant/drug from Figi), ostrich, horse, mutton bird, eel, whitebait (little bait fish in a pattie), I could go on for hours. There was great music too...especially an African drum band that played for well over an hour because people kept calling for an encore. I wish the weekend could have an encore!
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