Hokitika Wild Foods Festival
- March 2, 2007
- Rated 5 of 5 by
KJN1783 from Hartford, Connecticut
Every year, during the second weekend in March, Hokitika hosts the Wild Foods Festival. In 2006, on a road trip up the West coast of New Zealand’s south island, I couldn’t help but notice, as an avid foodie, Let’s Go’s claim, “If it crawls, its dinner at the phenomenally popular Wild Foods Festival, during the second weekend in March. Opossum, kangaroo, and grasshopper are among the tamer entrees. Book accommodations at least six months ahead.” So what if it was only six days before? We ended up driving about an hour away after the festival and sleeping in our van.
Hokitika, normally a quaint town with wrinkled old men on rockers outside their rickety antique stores, was bursting at the seams with over 20,000 people filing in for the annual celebration of the West Coast’s local culture: crazy cuisine, cold Monteith’s beer and lively music. We quickly realized the only way to get by would be to adopt the “I’ll-try-anything-once” attitude. And so we did, slurping down shots of moonshine and soup made with deer genitals and not looking as we gobbled up “sushi” with live worms, crocodile (it tastes like chicken!) and huhu grubs.
Just because the festival officially ended, the revelry certainly didn’t: the majority of Hokitika’s guests stuck around to show their wild sides, carousing through the streets and dangling off balconies: New Zealand’s own little Bourbon Street. In fact, Let’s Go’s description did not prepare us for the truly wildest part of the festival, more akin to Mardi Gras than say, a celebration of food. Many had come as a group, brandishing matching homemade tee-shirts, animal tails or, like one creative team of 20-something guys, costumed as bees, complete with tiny yellow tutus.
So, if you’re still wearing those beads you got in New Orleans last week, head down to Hokitika on March 10, 2007, and you’ll fit right in. As soon as you try some of that pig’s eye in macaroni and cheese.
From journal Hokitika Wild Foods Festival
Hokitika Wild Food Festival
- April 7, 2003
- Rated 4 of 5 by
JAA76 from Brisbane, Australia
It is basically an excuse to get a big bunch of people eating crazy foods and having a few drinks. For a population of a few thousand people it attracted 23,000 people. The food was diverse, the people friendly and for the size of it there weren't many problems
From journal Hokitika Wild Food Festival