Waitomo Caves and Tongariro Alpine Crossing, NZ

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A few days ago I met up with an old coworker, Jim, and his wife, Haley, who happened to be traveling through NZ this week, and we've been tearing up the north island together. Our first stop was the Waitomo Caves a couple hours south of Hamilton where they picked me up after surf camp. We pulled up to the Woodlyn Park hotel which boasts the only hobbit accommodations in NZ. But we stayed in the "Waitanic" which is a ship they put on dry land and renovated into multiple hotel rooms. We had a great view of a rainbow out of one of our portholes! The next morning we made our way to the caves to do the Black Labyrith tour. We got into some serious wet suits, helmets, and inner tubes, and embarked on a wet and wild trip through a water-filled labyrith of a cave. It is the home of thousands of bright green gloworms which made the cave ceiling look like a night sky with tiny green stars. Psychedelic... After much needed hot showers and soup, we hit the road for Turangi, the self-proclaimed trout fishing capital of the world, and springboard to the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, which is this crazy 18.5 km hike we did the next day. It's considered the best 1-day hike in NZ, and includes views of the volcano which was filmed in Lord of the Rings as Mt. Doom. But it was rainy, densely foggy, and brutally windy the day of our hike. So Mt. Doom was shrouded in gloom! Oh well, we did manage to snap pictures of other notable sites along the hike- what I've dubbed the volcanic wasteland, the Emerald Lakes you can barely make out in the fog, and Blue Lake on our way down when it finally cleared up. Also passed by some sulfur springs, a harbinger for our next couple days...

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Comments

[Eric Tam]

Those are some bitchin' outfits.