I clearly remember my first visit to the West Coast.
I was in my final year at Canterbury Uni and completing a landscape assignment for a photography course.
I needed to shoot some limestone landscapes so my girlfriend and I headed across Arthurs Pass in my terminally ill Ford Escort .
A combination of voluminous rain and a wonky distributor shaft meant that it took almost seven hours to get to our destination, just on dark. The petrol station attendant there was just closing and flatly refused to serve us. Moving further into town it proved impossible to scare up a proper meal, the best we could do was get the Southland pub to microwave a couple of frozen pies.
Everyone we met on that trip were well balanced, they had chips on both shoulders and seemed none too pleased to have out-of-towners about. My American girlfriend was none too impressed and kept on cracking Deliverance jokes. After a couple of days in a leaky campground cabin we were delighted to escape to back to civilisation.
Fast forward a couple of decades and the world has changed. That town is now the dynamic regional capital of adventure and eco-tourism and boasts more tasty eateries and Kiwi-host qualified providers than you could poke a manuka stick at. What’s more it has boiled down what makes life unique there and moulded it into an internationally recognised celebration of food and fun.
That town is Hokitika and last weekend I was lucky enough to be a judge at its 22nd Wild Food Festival. For two days this village of 4000 swells to 19,000 as local and foreign tourists flock to the local domain to sample such unlikely dishes as tahr salami, hard boiled seagull eggs and garlic slugs.
But it’s much more than that, it’s a two days festival of music, history and frontier lifestyle that showcases what the Coast has to offer and draws in serious revenue to the region. My back of an envelope calculation suggests that 15,000 people would spend on average $200 on accommodation, eating and ancillaries while they are there.
That equates to $3 million of direct benefits to the town, plus a good dollop of indirect revenue to the broader region that the visitors pass through.
I asked the Wild Food grand poobah Mike Keenan how it all got started 21 years ago. He told me it was initially an offshoot of the 1990 New Zealand Sequi Centennial Celebrations, when many community groups were finding it tough to get funding. They looked around and saw an abundance of wild food and a frontier location. “It was sitting in our face but til then we hadn’t seen it,” says Mike. The rest is history.
Across the Southern Alps with the large majority of emergency short term need addressed, Canterbury is formulating its long term plan for the rebuilding of Christchurch. Decades ago Christchurch moved from being a rural service centre into manufacturing and then tourism. It’s become a core part of the global tourism trail and will be again. But not today and not this year.
According to the Ministry of Economic Development, Canterbury has 11,600 people directly employed in the tourism sector. Right now a fair whack of them will be taking a hard look at the options open to them and seriously evaluating whether they should move elsewhere in New Zealand, or head overseas.
While you can’t blame them for this, it will likely have a throttling effect on the local tourism industry once the city is rebuilt enough to start enticing visitors back. There won’t be chefs to cook their meals, guides to host buses or operators to provide them with mountain bikes, historical tours or just clean beds.
Right now downtown Christchurch is battered and reeling like a punch drunk fighter. But it will come back and with it will come the tourism dollar –until then the region needs to diversify tourism away from downtown Christchurch to retain the income and importantly the workforce.
Hokitika’s Wild Food Festival might provide a useful example of what is possible. Over the last week I had the pleasure of visiting Waimate, Geraldine, Hanmer and Little River – all easily reachable from Christchurch. Each has personality in buckets and a physical environment that suits special events.
What’s to stop Waimate from hosting a wallaby celebration, Geraldine a jazz carnival, Hanmer a huge winter solstice and Little River a blossom festival? With a mixture of inspired destination marketing and solid event execution there’s no reason that Canterbury couldn’t play host to a ongoing series of festivals to help hang onto the $2.3 billion of revenue that Tourism delivered to the region last year.
Twenty years ago I remember my first visit to Martinborough, an hour from Wellington. It was a dusty and forgotten little rural service town. Today it fair ripples with energy and plays host to a huge rolling calendar of events and festivals.
I wonder what will be Canterbury’s Martinborough?
