guess i'll go eat worms...

…and crickets, grubs, crocodile, kangaroo, wild boar, venison, rabbit, kava, punga palm and snails. Yes, today was the big day – the one, the only Wildfoods Festival in Hokitika. I’ve wanted to go to this event since I first cracked open my Lonely Planet book last May, and I wasn’t disappointed. Okay, I was a little disappointed because apparently the health authority cracked down this year so fried possum and magpie pies and some unmentionables weren’t on the menu this time around, but the sheer numbers and quality of mullets on some festival-goers made up for it.

[side story: we saw this amazing ginger mullet and Irish-Ann chased down the guy to ask him for a picture, and he was with a friend…who turned out to be the son of the organic sheep/beef farmer I was working for in Gore a few months back! Small country.]

Anyway, the Wildfoods Festival celebrates the heritage of the still-wild-wild-West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand, and on the first weekend in March quadruples the population of the town to 20,000, even after you subtract out the 4,999 native Hokitikans who run for the hills when the attendees converge on the town.

Highlights and/or lowlights of the day included crickets on toast (shown in picture) which very nearly caused me to re-sample everything else I’d eaten up to that point, mouth- and mind-numbing kava flown in from Fiji that very day, Worms With Wings – worms in shots of Red Bull so you can kind of cheat by not having to chew the worm, and fried Huhu grubs. We were not brave enough to try the live ones, which you must first hunt out of a wood pile and then decapitate before eating. Apparently they taste great, but I’ll have to wait until next year, or never, to find out for myself.

Ann1, Ann2, Lex and I were met at the festival by Sandra, Sarah and Kev from Christchurch who’d decided to make the drive out west for the weekend. Sandra tended bar with me at Mulligan’s, Sarah is her friend and flatmate who worked at Foodstuffs with me, and Kev was a glass collector at the pub and I also knew him from City Oasis, my Christchurch hostel. It was great to see them but felt kind of weird because my time in Christchurch seems so close, yet so far away – it’s been less than a week, but with all the stuff we’ve done in the past six days it feels like forever!