There she blows!!!

Hello

From the Wellington region we headed North, via the Whanganui River road and through some beautiful small villages and lush countryside, complete with traditional maori marae´s - Meeting complexes, quaint churches and detailed carvings.

After a lovely day´s drive we arrived at yet another DOC campsite, this time at the base of the Tongariro mountain range, ready to set off the following morning on the infamous Tongariro Crossing - A days long walk throught the mountain range that was made famous for it´s staring role in Lord of the Rings (Mt Doom!)

Dan - Unfortunatly we couldn´t do the whole crossing as it starts and finishes in different places, and transport between the two points is non existant! bugger!! so we decided with a little help from a DOC man that it best to go half way (about 8km) from which point you can see the tail end anyway, but we also decided to take on Mt Ngaurnhoe (Mt Doom, and a picture perfect volcano shape) just to throw in a challange, little did we realise it was VERY steep and has no solid rock at all just rubble so you take three steps forward then slide back a wee way.

Nic - Oh yes, we like a challenge......We also managed to choose one of the hottest days of the summer so far to make it a little more torturous! The views from the top were well worth the hard slog and we could even see all the way across to the West coast and the snow capped peak of Mt Edgmont approx 200kms away! Coming down was the easy part....at first there was snow and ice to slide down and then when that ended you had to adapt your slide to a funky moonwalkesk stride.....almost skiing your way down!!! - 2hrs up, 20mins down!.....Shame about the larger boulders though that tore off one side of my leg...More war wounds to remember the trip by!!!

Dan - The rest of the crossng was pretty good, nice views of the ´Red Crater´, ´The Emerald Lakes´ and Mt Tongariro and easy in comparrison to the Mt Doom climb! So tired, battered and dusty we rolled back into the DOC campsite for a tap bath, some good tucker and a few sucks on the goon bottle.

Nic - So, that´s the main objective for the Norht Island covered, all we have to do now is mosey our way up to Aukland in time for our flight to South America.....So more random pictures of the rest of New Zealand soon!
xxxxxx

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