Mt Doom

---

We were up for an early start and after staying up late drinking, it was tough to make the 6.30am bus. Our next destination was the Tongariro National Park, which involved a 19km walk through the volcanic landscape. We all decided to do it and our group was starting to split and I was at the back of our group of about 8 as one of the girls was struggling and I didn't want to leave a man behind. But after her second time of trying to sort some blisters out she decided to go back to the start. So i walked really fast up the stairs to try and catch the others only to see another from our group struggling, so caught a breather and made sure she was ok. She managed to get to the next flat plain and out the corner of my eye I saw Andreas and Derek (Swede and Belgian) heading for Mt Doom (the final scenes of Lord of the Rings), so I said to her friend 'will you make sure shes ok' she was like 'yeh yeh', so i started running across to catch the other two guys and we scaled the volcano together. Quite a tricky terrain, but was fun and halfway up we bumped into Neil, Laura and Liz who were on our bus until we got off in Rotorua, so pretty strange to meet whilst climbing a volcano. The views were spectacular once the clouds had cleared and could have stayed up all day, but our bus was at 5.30pm and we were a long way off. We shimmied down the volcano as if it was sand. We were told that we had to be at a certain hut with 2 hours to go to make the bus and we only have 70 minutes left, so we decided to run through the crossing and thankfully it was downhill. The others got a bit tired so I ran on ahead to tell them we were coming and managed to make it with 10 minutes to spare. Great way to get some fitness. Then as per usual on the drink in the evening, not sure how long my liver can take it. Will probably come back here for a few days before I fly out as it was a really nice hostel and a great place to relax before going back to the real world.

---