20 km walk ... this doesnt sound too hard...

---

Sunday 16th

Few more days and its the end of tour for me. But first had to get passed this crossing. The Tongariro Crossing is in Tongariro National Park, which was the first national park in NZ and the fourth in the world with three volcanoes, of which we could see the steam coming out of vents as we drove closer. The three volcanoes all active still and are called Mount Ruapehu, Mount Ngauruhoe and Mount Tongariro. Ruapehu is the oldest volcano where as Ngauruhoe is the youngest. Both Ruapehu and Tongariro have vents of steam in the sides of the volcanoes but Ngauruhoe is a conical volcano. Ngauruhoe is also famous because it was used as the volcano known as Mount Doom, Mordor in Lord of the Rings.

The crossing itself doesn't take us over the summits of the volcanoes. We don't go close to Ruapehu, we walk up towards Ngauruhoe but we walk past it (and the turn off point to the summit) and past the trail that would take us towards the Tongariro summit above the remains of Red Crater and the lakes.

So, we woke early, got into the van, and drove from Rotorua, through Taupo down to the Tongariro Crossing. We arrived outside a shop about 9ish, where we had to make sure we had the right gear just in case of weather changing, as well as food and water. At 10 we were dropped off by one of the drivers who dropped people at one end of the trek and picked them up at the other so that we didn't have to leave the van at one place and have to go back later to pick it up.

So at 10am we started the walk from km 0 and we had about 8 hours to get to km 19.4. We started at Mangatepopo car park and we finish in Ketehahi car park. The first part of the walk was fairly gentle, slowly climbing up. When we got to the last group of toilets, we had to climb the Devil's Staircase, which was really hard for me, but after that everything was much easier. At the top of the staircase, there was a trail leading off to the summit of Ngauruhoe or Mount Doom, but this would have been an extra possible 2 hours and we didn't have time (next time it will be done). We walked up to the Red Crater, above the three blue lakes and stopped there for lunch. From there, it was pretty much downhill, first going through loose shingles to get to the bottom of the next crater (bit of a scary experience) and then a straight flat route to the biggest lake maybe a km away.

Then it was about a 3 hour walk down to the Ketehahi car park, and when I say down, I mean down. There were a few uphills which made the way down doable but by the time Tash and I got to the car park, my feet and knees were in pain. The driver pulled up to pick us up with an ice box full of cold beer and two warm beers. I was lucky and got a warm beer. We dropped off Simon who picked up the g adventures van and followed us up to the lodge we were staying at for the night. It was in a ski village called Whakapapa (pronounced Fu-ka-papa). There was a hot tub which was awesome, and the buffet for dinner.

---