Exploring Hokitika – Day 113

Today we are making our way to New Zealand’s Coolest Little Town.

This is our last morning in Greymouth and we are taking the time to roam around the Noah’s Ark Backpackers which have been kind enough to host us for our Greymouth feature, it’s a hostel which is featuring heaps of animal theme stuff like plates on the wall, painting and even wall paper. it’s just a crazy looking place which is definitely worth seeing when staying in the Greymouth area. But we are pretty busy today we have to hit the road and we are making our way all the way to the little cool town of Hokitika, which is about an hour drive away from Greymouth. Yes we are now going form Greymouth in the Grey District and changing colours to Hokitika which is part of the Jade Country. Hokitika is famous for having lots of greenstone, otherwise known as jade or in Maori it’s called pounamu. For our stay in Hokitika Laura and I came up with a really fun challenge. We have to make for each other a greenstone pendant we have organised to carve it ourselves with a company here in Hokitika but we have to come up with a design that represents the other person. So we are going to all the gift shops in the area trying to find some really cool inspiration and some really cool design ideas. But we are also limited to our abilities . We have never carved anything before aside from the bone necklace that we carved a few days ago and we have to find something that is easy enough to do. We find in one of the gift shop a really cool pamphlet that goes over the pamphlet meanings and we will inspire ourselves with that one to come up with a super original design.

there are so many of these jade stores here in Hokitika and we are overwhelmed with inspiration, I’m not even sure if we can replicate any of these designs but there really is a lot to look at. The Maori traditionally use this greenstone to gift to each other and carve into different designs showing a status or symbol in the tribe or iwi is as it’s known in Maori. So you learn a lot about the traditions here as well as we’re looking through the different designs of the pounamu but a really cool thing about some of the stores in Hokitika is that they actually have a place where you can watch the master carvers at work. there are some stores where you can look through a window to see people carving but in this one here we actually go inside the studio to get a close-up look at the carvings.

But Hokitika is also home of the world’s greatest sock store. So if you thought greenstone wasn’t appealing enough, here is another reason to get yourself to the little cool town of Hokitika. I, to be honest, did not know there was a need for the world’s greatest sock store or that there was a need for a specific machine to make your own socks at home but apparently this is a thing and this little museum slash world’s greatest sock store is definitely an attraction not to be missed in Hokitika. Or to be missed in Hokitika, it depends how much time you have to be honest.

But after this funny little break, laura and i are heading toward the Hokitika Beach. the Hokitika Beach is world famous for it’s amazing sunset and while waiting for the sunset Laura and I are going to sitting on the beach being inspired by the waves and the beautiful view and start designing our pounamu that we’re going to be carving for each other. We are not going to show it to each other anything until the carving process starts so for now it’s a secretive drawing process.

So my design is kind of incorporating the hook part which is meant to mean about strength and determination which are features which I think Robin has, but also i’m sticking a whale tail on the end there because I saw a lot of these whale tails in the stores and Robin likes whales.

On my side, i’m going for kind of a twist which is representing infinity and bond as well as a koru shaped carved inside the necklace which represents the love for nature. I really thought that was a really cool idea to incorporate both of those forms together and I feel that the shape that I came up with is the basically only way I can put them together. Once we are happy with our designs or basically our crappy little doodle for now we are heading toward the beach and trying to find a great spot to watch the sunset. We finding ourselves a nice little quiet spot with no one around. Just us the sunset and the waves, it’s pretty awesome.

Another really awesome feature of Hokitika Beach is that there’s all this driftwood about which people have made these really cool sculptures and one that we have to take a photo of is Hokitika sign. There are some amazing photo opportunities here and the sky is lit up with all these beautiful colours we get this awesome silhouette and then we are heading over to the Mountain Jade Backpackers which is our accommodation for this evening.

Tomorrow we are going to explore the world famous Hokitika Gorge and their milky blue water which are going to blow your mind. this place that we’re going to show you tomorrow as actually real and no CGI has been used to make it look like that.