Matthew's New Zealand Blog

Hello friends and family,

Although I feel presumptious in creating this blog, as if my experiences are important enough to constitute a webpage, I have found that this blog will be the easiest and most efficient way to share my experiences and photographs with my friends and family. Instead of sending out emails and asking you to view pictures on facebook, I can post messages on this blog and include pictures to be viewed by whoever is given the address for this blog- http://www.matthewthekiwi.blogspot.com/. With that being said, here is a recount of my trip this past weekend to the Wildfoods Festival in Hokitika and the West Coast.

Early Friday morning at 7 am (I do not have class on Friday), my four Spanish friends- Marc, Ferran, Carmen, and Maria, and one of my Dutch friends- Tess, set out to Hemnar Springs, a 6 hour drive, in the car that said Spanish friends had bought. The road was beautiful throughout the duration of the trip as we curved between mountains and over glacial streams, and we arrived promptly at Hemnar Springs, where some natural hot springs have been made into a tourist-trap "hot spring water park". We enjoyed the hot sulfur pools for a while, then headed west to experience some real hot springs, which we only about 1 meter deep and included clouds of biting sandflies. As a result of said sandflies, we stayed only for a short while at the natural pools and continued on to our hostel in Greymouth on the west coast. We haerd of the Japan earthquake and resulting tsunami while in Greymouth, but were assured to learn that we were safe on the South Island. The hostel was very nice we cooked spaghetti dinner and got some sleep before heading the next morning to Hokitika to the festival. The festival was amazing. It is tradition that everyone dress in some sort of ridiculous costume at the festival and all of the kiwis had hilarious costumes- we went as hawiians because it was cheap. We stayed all day at the festival and enjoyed the following wild foods:
-Sheep testicles (horrible)
-Seagull eggs (tasted like sheep testicles)
-Huku grubs (not bad, tasted like crunchy peanut butter with worms guts)
-Venisin (as lunch, not as a test of stomach strength)
and my favorite
-scorpion (suprisingly tolerable after having been preserved in vodka)
The members of our group were all intelligent enough to not ingest the horse semen offered at the festival, but instead found enjoyment/disgust in watching others to so.
After the festival, we went to the beach and stayed there all night, as around 15 massive bonfires were started and all of the festival-goers sat on the beach and drank. I was astonished that this was legal, and spent most of my night with marc, releasing pent-up pyro-maniac tension in my muscles by scavanging drift-wood and fuelly our massive fire. That night we drove to Franz Joseph (ferran did not drink) and spent the night in a hostel there. We woke the next morning (Sunday) and walked to see the Franz Josef glacier, which was amazingly accessible and massive and lots of fun. The rest of Sunday was spent driving home along the west coast. Despite my fatigue, i did not sleep a wink during the 8 hour car ride, as I could not take my eyes off of the beautiful scenery through which we passed. The Spaniards continued to teach me Spanish throughout the trip, and I paid them back by singing American songs for them after our cassette played broke for the 5th time. I was equally amused by their attempts at singing American songs and their misinterpretation of the lyrics. We stopped a few times along the beach and at the Blue Pools, a river with astaonishingly clear water. The trip was tons of fun in so many respects, and we arrived back in Dunedin at 12:30 am this morning (Monday).
This weekend, I plan to go on another tramping trip with the tramping club to Fjordland National Park, but we shall see. Love to all!

Matthew

Here are some pictures Marc sent me. There are plenty more that I will post later.