Hokitika

We had to wait a couple of days this year for our annual family Christmas excursion. Simon had to work on Christmas Day and Boxing Day, and it rained on Christmas Day anyway, so we waited until the 27th. We had decided to visit the Hokitika Gorge, which we had never been to. It was a bad time to go there, since it is the peak of tourist season and there were hundreds of people, but the scenery was amazing. First, here is a glimpse of what we enjoyed on our way to the gorge.

When we arrived, the first order of business was to eat lunch. Elijah grilled burgers and we enjoyed delicious sandwiches.

Then, we walked the gorge track. The water was incredibly blue! That is caused by minute bits of rock ground off the mountains by glaciers, which is suspended in the water and reflects the blue of the sky.

This little girl got carried the entire way by big brothers. She felt like a queen!

James couldn’t resist crawling through this culvert. It was a tight enough squeeze that he had to keep his arms out in front of his head.

Think she likes the service she receives?

After we finished walking around the gorge, we decided to find some water so those who wanted to could go swimming. We checked out a beach along the sea, but it was open to the sun and those of us who didn’t want to swim decided we wanted shade to sit in, so we found a way down to the Taramakau River. The bridge in the background of some of these pictures used to be a rail/road bridge (see this post), but a new bridge was built beside it about six years ago, for cars, so the original bridge is for trains only. Several of the children went swimming…

…while Simon collected logs for firewood and got his caveman fix by teaching Elijah how to break them up into the right size for a bonfire without using a hatchet. It was pretty funny to watch that process! (No one got hurt.)

They made a very satisfying fire that burned down into a nice bed of coals for roasting sausages and marshmallows. While the fire was burning down, James requested that Esther read aloud to us. She hadn’t brought the book she is reading, but found it in an online library and downloaded it so we could read the next chapter.

Our family Christmas outing was very satisfying! Simon said at the end of the day that it had been “epic”–his highest praise!

One weekend in September, Gayle and I had to go to Christchurch for an appointment on a Saturday morning. We stayed that night with friends, went to church over there, and came home Sunday afternoon. All eight of our children were at home that weekend, and they went to Hokitika for church on Sunday morning, then spent the rest of the day doing things together. Esther took a lot of pictures, but said she wouldn’t be posting them on her blog, so I decided to share their day here. They started out by walking along the beach for a little way. The “boat” is just poured concrete, a picnic area. (There have been a lot of shipwrecks there; in the early days there was a wreck about every 10 days, many of which were just groundings on the bar at the mouth of the river.)

Then, they went out to eat at an Indian restaurant.

The final activity was to visit the National Kiwi Centre. We were there once before, years ago, but the younger ones either didn’t remember it or weren’t born yet.

There is a large tank of eels, some of which are about 6 feet long and 6 inches in diameter, and around 100 years old.

At feeding time, visitors are allowed to help feed them. Eels grow up in fresh-water creeks and rivers, and when they are ready to mate and lay eggs, they swim out to sea and to tropical islands near the equator. There, they lay eggs, then die. The eggs hatch and make their way back to New Zealand, where they grow to maturity–often a hundred years! The people who run the aquarium know their eels are ready to make their way to the sea when they come in in the morning and find an eel on the floor; at that point they release them into the river to swim to the sea.

The highlight of the day was catching crayfish. There is a clip on the end of a string tied to a pole. To catch a crayfish, they picked up a piece of meat with the clip and dangled it in the water; when a crayfish grabbed it, they would lift it up then catch it in a net. Apparently, our crew spent 45 minutes catching and releasing crayfish! A week later, the older boys took the younger children to catch crayfish in a river near here because they had so much fun at the aquarium.

Christmas 2024–Hokitka Gorge

Siblings Day!