Ramping up for our busiest time of year

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

Gisborne’s New Year’s holiday influx is well under way with our roads filling up and city centre bustling yesterday as the gates opened at Waiohika Estate for the 21st Rhythm & Vines.

The music festival that has transformed this time of year for Gisborne from laidback family-holiday beach destination to the place-to-be for the country’s 18 to 21-year-olds wanting to dance the nights away, is coming of age itself.

Most of the 15,000 on-site campers arrived yesterday to settle in among the slopes and grape vines off Back Ormond Road before their exclusive pre-party, the Waiohika Warmup — with two stages in action last night, Rhythm, one of the two main festival amphitheatres, and the atmospheric and electronic-heavy hillside Cellar Stage amid tall trees.

The three-day festival proper is once again a sellout, with 21,000 people expected on New Year’s Eve — a more manageable size, for the event and for Gisborne, than the heaving 30,000 revellers it peaked at in 2013.

On cue the temperature is heating up also thanks to a change to northerlies last night, with a forecast 25 degrees today (and rain likely in the afternoon), a stonking 29C expected for Saturday and a slightly fresher 27C on Sunday.

A MetService forecast out yesterday afternoon had a bob each way on whether there will be rain on New Year’s Eve, saying it depended on how fast the last wet weather front of the year moved across the country on Sunday.

For Gisborne there is a “chance of a shower from afternoon”, so at this stage it looks like it will be worth packing a poncho for festival-goers and everyone else out-and-about celebrating to bring in the new year.

2023 has been a year of disruption and fracture for the Tairāwhiti region, in the face of a weather onslaught that peaked with Cyclone Gabrielle but has been relentless in dumping well over two metres of the wet stuff on us — more than twice the usual rainfall, and the most by about 500mm since rain records started being kept here 146 years ago.

Our geologically unstable land has been washing away, taking many parts of our road network with it and causing particular destruction where large masses of trees and slash have been mobilised.

The recovery effort has a long way to go. Everyone has been tested to varying degrees.

So for most of us, this is a year we will be relieved to turn the page on.

A new year offers all the possibilities of a fresh beginning.

To our visitors, we thank you for coming and helping us build back some of what we have lost. We hope you have a great time here and tell your friends to visit us also.