Kumara is a town of approximately 300 people, yet it has a hotel with a remarkably good restaurant… From there we visited Hokitika, a town with about ten times the population. It had a lot of shops selling New Zealand greenstone (jade).
In honor of the holiday season, someone put some extra letters in front of the “Hokitika” sign so that it said: “Ho-Ho-Hokitika”. Among the 25 photos below, sadly, I do not have a photo of that.
Kumara / Hokitika Day 1
This pipe with holes rusted through the surface served as a planter in the Kumara hotel parking lot.
clock tower in HokitikaI’m sorta sad we didn’t go inside the Hokitika Sock World Sock Market.
Kumara/Hokitika Day 2
the view from our part of the hotel in Kumara
Andrew Carnegie had a lot of money, but not more than he knew what to do with. He knew exactly what to do with it. He went around building libraries. When I say “around”, I really mean “around the world”. All the way to Hokitika, apparently.I am perhaps disproportionately grateful to the grammar wizard who made this sign for correctly including a space between “every” and “day”.A friendly gentleman inside the Carnegie Building wound up this machine and showed us that it could still play records. When I was a kid, I had the plastic Fisher-Price version that played records for Disney Little Golden books, but that one didn’t have a hand crank. It had to be plugged in.The voice of Bing Crosby came through pretty clearly!
New Zealand Christmas tree flower budsNew Zealand Christmas tree flowers
