Never Trust A Festival

We're back on the road again! Two days ago, we loaded up the wagon completely for the first time since Christmas. To make things easy on ourselves, we set an easy-to-reach first day destination of Hokitika, about a 2.5 hour drive north of Fox Glacier. We know how terrible we are at ever getting anywhere in a reasonable amount of time, so we decided to not be overly ambitious. And thankfully so, because we made our grand exit about 4 hours later then our target departure.

Stuff like this may be why we're always late for things.

Our tentative plan was to check out the Wildfoods Festival in Hokitika, hike around the Hokitika River Gorge, and camp at one of the area's many beautiful lakes before heading up to Arthur's Pass National Park the next day. When we arrived in Hokitika, the Wildfoods Festival was in full swing. While the festival is supposed to be a celebration of the creative use of locally sourced foods both wild and farmed, it's more like New Zealand's Altamont. If you want to give youths an excuse to drink a month's pay in a few hours, dress up in bizarre outfits with no relevance to the event and make some impressively bad decisions, just throw up some tents, bring in live music and throw the word "Festival" on the end. A town could create an annual gathering of quilting, baking, apple-bobbing and scripture reading, call it the Wholesome Convention, and never have a problem. But the moment the organizers threw up a stage and started calling it the Wholesome Festival, a drug-and-booze-fueled bacchanalia would be born, attracting hitchhikers from around the country. Sadly, we forgot the camera in the car, which is probably for the best.

Needless to say, we're cheap and boring these days, so we decided to remove ourselves to a more peaceful and free environment. We'd read about the Hokitika River Gorge a few weeks before leaving Fox, so we decided we'd have to check it out if we were passing through.

After about a 45 minute drive around seemingly endless farm land and a short hike down a handful of switchbacks, we arrived at a swinging bridge spanning a beautiful rocky gorge carved by a strangely blue-shaded river. Much of the water we've seen in New Zealand is brilliantly colored, and this water is no different, but the coloring was less like the crystal clear blue mountain rivers we've seen on much of the West Coast, and more like the candy flavor Blue Raspberry. Still, the gorge was a beautiful side trip, and now it was time to find a place to test out our new tent. To hopefully avoid any crowds from the festival, we stayed a little ways outside of town at Lake Kaniere, which turned out to be a beautiful spot to spend a night outside.

We wasted no time the next morning packing up and hitting the road for Arthur's Pass. This national park rests in the high country of the Central South Island, surrounded by mountains, along the main route from Christchurch to the West Coast. The drive only takes about an hour and half from the west, so we made it up there pretty quick.

Kea: The Grizzly Bear of Arthur's Pass!

We explored around the area a little bit, looked into where we could stay, and struck gold with a hostel called Mountain House. This place provides the same typical lodging as most hostels (shared bathrooms, kitchens and common areas), but the units are split up into several separate cottages and outfitted with wood burning stoves. 

Since we had plenty of daylight left, we set out to explore our hiking options, and decided on a walk called the Devil's Punch Bowl (we didn't have enough time to hike Satan's Silver Drawer, and Krampus's Linen Closet was closed for trail maintenance). The Devil's Punch Bowl trail is a fairly short and steep hike up to a viewing platform near the base of a 430 ft waterfall. The whole area is covered with hikes that range from a few hours to several days, but since we're still missing a few necessary items from our backpacking collection, we'll have to come to the area later in our travels to more thoroughly see the area on foot.

That's about all for now! After a night in the mountains and a beautiful sunrise over Arthur's Pass, we're back on the highway today, passing some alpine farm country, fun rock outcroppings, and nearing the east coast as we make our way to the Banks Peninsula and Akaroa!