Ooooh huhu

Fruitbat, guinea pig, crocodile, camel - and now, finally, huhu grub. Not unpleasant, pickled: kind of creamy with a distinct peanutty aftertaste. But crunching the head wasn't nice, and knowing it was a larva was even less so, and I won't be rushing back here for seconds.

Hokitika, that is: for the Wildfood Festival in March. Popular though it is, there are much better reasons to come to the "coolest little town on the Coast". Wild scenery, gold rush history, great walks, good real food (turbot! Only place in NZ to catch it!) and very nice people - one of those we met today actually from Hokitika.

So it was a good end to a day that began with disappointment when our helicopter ride up onto Franz Josef Glacier was cancelled due to rain. Instead, we walked up, kitted out with crampons and firmly instructed by Phil (from Taupo) to "trust your feet" as we teetered nervously at the top of long flights of uneven steps hacked out of the ice. He was right: the spikes saved us, and we filed safely up, down and over a bit of the glacier, blue and turquoise and impressively huge.

It was cool. Ha ha.

Wild West

Busy, busy, here on the West Coast of the South Island, where the tourism industry is run entirely by people "from away", most of whom it seems chanced through here, fell in love with the place and could never leave again.

So Jo from Wellington has told us all about the coal connoisseurs, anti-litter .303 persuasion and her husband winning the gold for her wedding ring at the Kumara Races in a gold-miner dress-up competition. Steve from the Solomons showed me how to carve my own greenstone pendant. Matt from Christchurch explained how he loves getting irritated at a 2-minute traffic delay on his way to work. Howie from Taranaki took us deep into caves, showed us an actual glow-worm and then paddled us backwards in inner tubes under a fluorescent galaxy of siren-lights before sending us shooting over foot-deep rapids that were quite as exciting as the real thing.

Today we've watched elegant snowy herons with their fluffy chicks, and comical spoonbills with spiky topknots nesting up a secret river, the only place in the country that the kotuku breed.

There have been trains and boats and planes, and tomorrow helicopters - but only if the weather continues as fine and sunny (mostly) as it's been so far. Trying hard not to tempt fate, here.

Cracks in Everything

Well, not in absolutely everything, but you don't have to look very hard to fnd them. If not cracks, then patches of plastic on roofs where the chimneys have gone. And then, in the city, there's the scaffolding, fencing, blocked-off footpaths, empty sections blowing with dust, and wounded buildings being so slowly put out of their misery, nibbled away at bit by bit, as the pile of rubble beside them grows.

But Christchurch is still lovely in most places: neat and pretty and relaxed, with lots to enjoy and admire. And there are still ducks on the grass by the Avon.

PS: The total of aftershocks since the big one on 4 September is now officially more than 2700; and over the weekend I was on the West Coast, they had another cluster of 4+ shakes, including one of 4.9 - and did I feel even one of them? No. Sigh.

Startled barn...

...is startled. (On the way back to Lake Chelan from the Grand Coulee Dam.)

I hope I'm not going to be too startled myself tomorrow, when I spend a night in Christchurch where they're now past 2,500 aftershocks since the big quake on 4 September - and counting. I'm expecting to see my hometown looking a little frazzled around the edges, but still elegant and calm and beautiful. Fingers crossed.

Then it's the great TranzAlpine train journey right across the island, over the Southern Alps, to the West Coast for a few days - where it will, unfortunately but fairly typically, be raining. Sigh.

Gooseberry fool

There's panic in the Bay of Plenty today as a potentially virulent virus has been found there that can wipe out kiwifruit plantations. It's caused great problems overseas, and the rush is on to identify the strain found here, with many fingers crossed that it's not the nastiest one.

It's caused by a bacterium, and I don't know what the treatment would involve, but I remember all too well what happened when the Painted Apple Moth was discovered here: we were sprayed several times by crop-dusters roaring over our suburb, low, noisy and swamping us in an unpleasant mist that many people claimed gave them respiratory problems. It certainly did the trick: no more PAMs - and no more butterflies of any other sort either. We used to have so many monarch butterflies in the garden that I got bored with them, but not after the spraying. Even eight years later, they're still a rare sight here.

Tedious though the MAF checks at the airport are, when all you want after a long flight is to burst through the double doors and get home again, it's impossible to argue with their necessity. I do dispute the accuracy of the sniffer beagles however, cute though they are: one has picked on me entirely wrongly, convinced there was forbidden material in my backpack when there was nothing of the sort; and the luggage x-rays too missed the stowaway lizard from the Cook Islands that made it all the way back to my bedroom at home.

That was a bit of a drama, freezing it to death and then posting it to the MAF people in the dramatically OTT kit they couriered me, with disposable gloves, disinfectant-infused towelling and a big screw-top jar - all for a little gecko that could never have survived a winter here.

The 'kiwis' in this photo, by the way, are an entirely new (to me) cold-weather variety that was for sale in the market at Bellingham in Washington state. They look nothing like ours, but taste exactly the same. Perhaps I've found the solution...

Keeping up... the Good Work

You know, we'd driven past this sign at least three times before I saw what it meant. I'd actually felt mildly shocked, in amongst the natural beauty of the valley outside Winthrop, to come across a billboard that, at first glance, I took to be advertising something almost entirely opposite to what was really intended.

The past is another country

Went to see the movie Made in Dagenham this afternoon, and greatly enjoyed it: about the 187 women machinists who went on strike at the Ford factory there in 1968 for a higher rate of pay and ended up setting in train the legislation that led to equal pay for all women, not just in the UK but as a consequence in other countries around the world. Inspiring stuff.

It was also fascinating to see how different England looked in those days. I went there nine years later and can remember some of the characteristics that look so dated and foreign now - the crabbed look of women in headscarves weighed down with vinyl shopping bags; hideous apartment blocks of cramped flats; men in flat caps with visible vests under their white shirts - but the general feel of impoverishedness was striking.

You don't miss what you've never had of course, and I imagine people then were as happy with their black and white TVs and hissy transistors as we are with our smart phones and laptops, not knowing what much better technology awaits us in the future. But it looked so uncomfortable, and unattractive. When did it get better? The seventies, with the big hair and men's short shorts? The eighties, with the greed and the conspicuous consumption? The nineties, with reality TV and crippling guilt about the environment? Now?

Today we also booked our tickets for the Great Family Trip to the UK next year to show the girls where they were born: their first return there since they left as little children. I wonder how they'll see it? The countryside will be as undeniably beautiful as ever - but will the people look cool or quaint?