Hangi Dinner

A Hangi is a traditional Maori method of cooking by using heated rocks buried in sand or soil.  It involves digging a pit, heating stones in the pit with a big fire, then putting food in there before covering the pit up again for a couple hours.  What would a tour of New Zealand be without making our own Hangi?  So, here we find ourselves, two nights before the hiking trip is over, on a black-sand beach of west coast New Zealand, digging a hole and making our own Hangi dinner.  And let me tell you, it was so scrumptious.

We searched for a spot and deemed this place suitable for our Hangi pit.

The black sand is actually really cool.  And very soft sand too.

First the twigs go in our pit.

Then criss-cross the firewood from longest to shortest across the top.

Now we put the stones we collected in a nice little pile right on top...

...and light the fire.  Now we wait.  The fire gets bigger and burns down all the branches.  The stones fall to the middle of the pit.

Then we throw all the food we prepared, wrapped in foil, into the pit with the rocks: potatoes, kumera (NZ sweet potato), onions, a whole chicken, and a yummy vegetarian dish (curry in a carved out pumpkin).  Soak a couple towels in sea water and lay them on top of it all before shoveling the sand back onto the pit.

We waited about two hours before frantically digging it out again and chowing down on our feast.  We miscalculated the tide and had to dig a couple trenches in front of it, lest our chicken be taken away by unstoppable sea gods!

The next morning me and one of the other more adventurous hikers on our trip went with the tour guide to check out an old overgrown Maori pa (fortified village/settlement).  You could tell where the terraces were and see deep holes where they would store food, pretty cool.  From the top of the hill you could definitely tell why they chose those kinds of sites to keep an eye on their territory.  Check out this view.  And see that first black sand beach on the right?  That's where we made the Hangi the night before.

A shot to show you how overgrown it all was (find tour guide with funny hat in the bush).  Hooray for adventures and hooray for New Zealand: no snakes at all and no spiders that can kill you!  Wow, what a difference from Australia.  There's no way we would have been traipsing around in this bush had we been in Aussie.