Quote: Two great things about my hike on Charles Royal’s Maori Indigenous Food Trail:

1. I got to experience eating Charles’ on-the-fly gourmet lunch under a spectacular waterfall.
2. Though we brought a small ax with which to surprise grubs, we didn’t find any, so I didn’t have buck up and taste one.

Charles Royal is a Maori chef who studies, expands, and promotes the use of ingredients indigenous to New Zealand, including plants such as horopito and piko piko. He’s one of the hardest working people I’ve ever met and is a fascinating blend of chef, businessman, ambassador, and woodsman. He’s also the perfect person with whom to explore the North Island’s fern-filled woods—especially if you have a yen for snacking on ferns.

My group of five began our food-foraging tour at Treetops Lodge, but Royal offers similar tours in other areas around Taupo and Rotorua. As we walked over the course of about an hour, our guide pointed out and collected edible plants, some of which we’d be eating for our grand-finale lunch. He climbed cabbage trees, snapped fiddlehead ferns, and grabbed supplejack as he talked. We learned, for example, that out of the over 300 varieties of ferns in New Zealand, only seven are edible. Luckily, or perhaps unluckily, when we asked if eating an inedible fern would kill us, Charles assured us that it would not—at least, "not straightaway."

Refraining from impulsive snacking, then, we continued absorbing Charles’ encyclopedic knowledge of the culinary and medicinal riches growing in his country’s woods. His impetus for learning, and teaching, the subject is the fact that the only traditional Maori food making it to tables today is the hangi, a method of cooking on hot stones. And Charles believes there is much more to explore.

I could have continued hiking and listening to Charles for hours, but before we knew it we rounded a bend that took us face to face with a spectacular, hidden waterfall. It was one of those great moments in travel that reminds you why you do it.

We set up the table and chairs that were waiting for us on a platform under the waterfall and Charles commenced with preparing lunch, searing salmon, venison, and more on a portable stove top, and infusing it all with ingredients from the bush and his own creations, such as spicy horopito rub and piri piri herbs. The feast included bread with horopito hummus, mussel salad, fern focaccia bread with piko piko pesto, venison with horopito rub, kumara and taro fritters, South Island salmon with kawakawa rub, manuka-honey tea, and kawakawa shortbread.

Native herbs or not, Charles is a wonderfully talented and inventive chef, and an even more wonderful person to talk to on the trail. I highly recommend taking one of his tours for an educational and gastronomical day of bliss. I'm still talking about my tour—and enjoying the free samples he sent home with me.
From journals Taupo and Environs: Grab the Chilly Bin and Go!