Following in the Footsteps of Frodo...

After jumping out of an aeroplane, not much else was achieved that day. I did however have time to drive all the way to Rotorua (and the accompanying smell) and back to pick up all the things I had left in the hostel there (seriously, don‘t ask, after five months of knowing where everything is and packing it away in the same way almost every day the car has made us completely useless. I left a large portion of my clothing drying in the hostel… but thankfully it was all still there!)

The next day we took a walk from Aratiatia dam, back toward Taupo via Huka falls. The dam opens every couple of hours to let a torrent of water down river. The walk followed the Waikato river all the way. We even managed to grab a sneaky peak at the Prawn Farm!

In the evening we managed to find an Irish bar (god knows how, there are soooo few of them around the world…). It was playing the Australian Open final, so now we can say we were in Taupo when Andy got another whooping. After this disappointing turn of events we retired to sleep in the car again in the YHA Taupo car park, a very good undercover car park perfect for a bit of car sleeping if anyone is ever in the area. So good infact that we were one of three cars there that was full all night!!

In the morning we settled behind the wheel again and drove ourselves to National Park (actually the name of the place, named after the park apparently… original!). On the way we noticed the beautiful sunshine, inviting cool blue of lake Taupo and the many picnic sites by the side of the road. Needless to say we jumped in and it was awesome. We also stopped at a historic site, which we couldn’t make head or tail of. Apparently everything noted on the map of the site was still buried, which kind of made the visit a little pointless. Nice view though! We also drove to some caves, but they were actually for caving, and I didn’t get very far in before the need for at least a helmet became apparent.

National park itself is tiny, only one shop, one pub etc… but it has nice hostels so we grabbed a bed and prepared ourselves for the next day, for the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. The crossing is meant to be one of the best day hikes in the world, about 20km of volcanic landscape. It’s something we had been planning to do for a few days but had until this point failed to embark upon due to the weather. The crossing itself turned out to be pretty easy compared to the other hikes we had done, we would have completed it in about 5 hours if we hadn’t taken on the extra challenge of CLIMBING MOUNT DOOM!! (as in Lord of the Rings). There is no path up the mountain, infact climbing it turned out to be bloody dangerous. We literally had to scramble/boulder/climb over volcanic scree and rock, pick the wrong foot hold and you go sliding back down! We huffed and puffed to the top though, and were treated to fantastic views and a seriously cool crater to peer into (really nice echo if you throw rocks in…). After a ginger biscuit and banana break we had to make our way back down. In the end we actually decided to take the advice of the bus driver (who had very short shorts) and ski/slide down a pyroclastic flow. This was probably even more dangerous than the climb, but we figured less dangerous than trying to climb back down the rock ridges. A couple of northern kids slid past us at speed at one point with the genius addition of ‘socks on hands’ for all the times our feet got a little carried away and we ended up on our bums. How they managed to film Frodo in this area I have no idea! Anywho, great walk!! Lot of steaming and craters and other shit that the guy from the geography field trip was chatting about…

Today we drove south to Wellington along the Wanganui river road (awesome and totally different views included) and are about to have some beer…