Drive to Hokitika for Wildfoods Festival and Pancake Rocks along the way.

We try to take care of administrative matters before we leave the Archer House in Westport but its caretakers, Jackie and Charlie, who are about to tour Scotland and England for six months, just want to talk. They are so kind and helpful, it’s difficult to get on the intermittent internet to take care of banking, tax — we’re being audited by D.C. — our blog, other matters. But we finally head south for Hokitika’s Wildfoods and Feral Costume Festival and stop at Charleston, a former gold-mining town that had 60 hotels in its day; one motel now. We take Cynthia’s picture beneath the city’s Welcome sign as homage to her home town. Push on as slowly as the traffic behind us permits, as the guidebook instructs because this sinuous reach of coastline is the southern island’s Great Coast Road and it is spectacular as we make our way to see the pancake rocks of Punikaki.

You would think we would be sick of this geography but we are not. Tall, deeply forested mountains rise sharply on our left from a winding two-lane road with long curving bays on our right. Rolling white ribbons of waves, sometimes in series of 15 or 20 curve into the bays, frothing against the black volcanic sentinel rocks and arches that resist erosion near the bays’ extremities. The Tasman Sea is blue and green and turquoise across an endless horizon defined only by a few clouds whose flat bottoms perfectly parallel the water, as if the narrow space between them was cut by a razor.

We park at Punikaki and walk on a sidewalk to the pancake rocks (see photo). The information boards tell us that the rock formations are a bed of granite with successive layers of limestone on top, but that no one has plumbed the mystery of why the limestone is layered, rather than compressed into a single strata as it has been in similar places around the rest of planet earth. But we’re not going to solve this today, so we push on, through Greymouth, so we will get to the Wildfoods Festival in time to eat huhu grubs and other truly disgusting morsels at a fair ground ringed with white tents.

We check into our hotel — the nice receptionist points out the discotheque under our window and says, “It’s a nice band, really. Not as loud as the bands in the festival.” — and wander down Main Street, following a sparse crowd on the sidewalk that can be described as “youngsters going, oldsters coming.” We wonder if we’re on the wrong side of history but, once we’re through the ticket booth at the festival and see the brawny guys splitting open the rotting tree stumps and plucking out the wriggling huhu bugs for people to eat — looks like a slightly translucent ridged maggot about the size of a large thumb with a single brown eye at one end (or maybe it’s not an eye. Maybe it’s … nope, nope, NOT going there) — we know we’re just where we want to be.

People wander the wide grassy area inside a ring of white tents selling all manner of foods, most of them benign, and a rock ‘n roll band in a tent plays pretty good cover tunes from the 70s and 80s. About 2,000 people wander around, some blind drunk. A bouncer at the entrance to the beer tent stops one young shirtless man who’s wavering like a tall grass in a breeze and tells him, “You’ve been here three times in the last hour, mate. You’re not coming in again. There’s plenty to see out and around. Have a good time.” No argument follows.

The day is lovely, sunny. We’re surrounded by people dressed in the weirdest costumes, eating and drinking and listening to music on a fairground by a beach. Life is good.

We have dinner. We will omit descriptions of the four Aussie guys at the table next to our first table and we will omit describing the cluelessness of the waitress we had at our second table. We finished dinner and went back to the festival for a little night music by two live bands — Slack hammered through some serious bass lines in front of three ten-foot towers of pulsing lights, followed a band change when a DJ played a tune by Fat Freddy’s Drop that had everybody singing along. Then, after the stage techies got the dry ice mister going and the blue strobe lights circling the tent roof and the audience, My Baby started up: a gal in a red bustier with a kimono and other Janis Joplin accoutrements, including two guitars, whose hands moved like a Thai dancer throughout her set. Her drummer and bassist found that perfect synch for the hundreds on the dance floor to raise their hands and dance the night away in a mix between head-banger and techno-trance.

These two bands proved to be much, much better than the one beneath our bedroom window. And we had another, occasionally loud, day in Paradise.