Hokitika

26 - 28 January 2023

Julie’s Feet in the Hokitika River

We spent a couple of nights in Hokitika on our way down the Western Coast.

One way bridge, a fixture on route 6. If you have the small red arrow you don’t have the right of way.

Anthony made a friend

We stayed at a cozy big bed and breakfast just outside of Hokitika. There were cows in the pasture surrounding the B&B.

We stopped by the Hokitika Kiwi Center where they had a vat of fresh water eels. Some of these eels were 100 years old. All female, and sterile. They had a feeding time, where they let kids feed the eels. As you can see, a lot of eels went hungry.

They also had two Kiwi birds. They were a lot bigger than we expected. Since Kiwi are nocturnal, it was really dark, and we did not get good pictures.

The next day we went for a hike in the Hokitika gorge. Anthony took a dip in the Hokitika river, which is glacier fed and quite chilly. The river was a spectacular aqua blue, caused by the minerals in the glacier melt. Stunning.

We drove out to the Hokitika Tree Top walk. This might look familiar, as it has a cantilevered walkway overlooking a lake. This walk also had a zipline, which we didn’t do. (We have a zipline in Queenstown). We may be done with tree top walks.

That Friday evening, the local cinema was showing a Sci-Fi B-Movie by a New Zealand director. The director was at the show, and talked about the joys and struggles of self-funding and producing a movie. After the movie, we walked to the beach to watch the sunset.

View of the mountains on the way to Franz Joseph.

We headed down to Franz Josef on a beautiful Saturday morning. We had a helicopter trip to the glaciers scheduled for Sunday morning. We stopped at a bathroom along the way, where a helicopter pilot there gave us terrific advice, “If you can, move your helicopter trip to today. Tomorrow might be nice, but you know what the weather is today.” We were happy we took his advice.

Decommissioned bridge at the bathroom break.