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Published: March 26th 2009
Alrighty there. I'm full of beans today, having had a really nice afternoon/evening yesterday and a sunny morning teaching people Poi today. And a gooood sleep!
I have also, funnily enough had a really good few days. I decided not to spend a 3 nights in Taupo, so that i could hang out with the crew on my bus as they are pretty ace. This meant I had to move my Tongariro Crossing walk to a day earlier than I had planned, which meant getting up at 6am on Tuesday morning. I had been a bit ill, but thought bugger it I may as well do it when my friends are doing it. The crossing itself is known to be one of the top 10 day hikes in the world, and one of the best in New Zealand. We had a dodgy (woman) driver on the way there, who couldn't seem to find the gears and then nearly crashed us in to another bus (and i thought things would be an improvement here from India!) and we finally got to the start of the walk at 8.15am. I chose my walking buddy luckily as someone who matched my pace and we
set off. I struggled a bit on 'Devil's Staircase' as we had kind of rushed the first part because it was quite easy, but then the staircase loomed up on us and i foolishly tried to go up it at the same speed. This didn't last for too long! But I conquered it and got up to the first summit. The day was once again fantastic and the views were bloody amazing! We all took millions of pictures of Mt R........ (aka Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings) and set off up the next part. We could've walked up Mount Doom but I wasn't feeling up to it, and had other things planned for the latter part of the afternoon (find out what further down!). At one point we were heading up to another summit when some people set off down a different path. We decided half way up that it was too windy to climb to the top and freeeezing, so decided to follow them, only to find that the real path did actually lead up the top. So we had to Frodo and Samwise styleee scrabble around the side to try and work our way up to
the top again, avoiding the orcs and some crazy dude muttering 'My precious'. But we made it and I phoned Claire at the top coz I found some signal and raved about how amazing New Zealand was for a bit. Then it was time to decend again, trying to surf the rubble and not fall in the hot sulfurous lakes. Then it took another 4 hous to actually make it down to the bottom, to find that we once again had the lady driver. Agh. I definitely recommend the hike to people, it was ace!
The late afternoon was spent at the airport. Yes, that's right, I did do a 15,000 ft Skydive. (And survived!) IT was crazy, but I loved it. Don't worry mum, I won't make you watch the video. But yeah, the skydive was great. When I was being filmed in freefall though, I forgot to make any cool shapes, like superman or swimming, just put my thumbs up and grinned! I surprisingly wasn't that nervous. Just accepted what was happening and got on with it. In fact it was a relief to jump out, as the whole way up, the guy in front of me was
sat right in my lap crushing my important parts and so getting out of there felt very good! So thats another activity to cross of my 'before i'm 30 list'.
After that we all got a bit drunk, nuff said. next day we made our way to River Valley via some cool looking waterfalls (and very cool they were i'm told, the people who went under them couldn't feel their legs after 3 seconds exposure!) and a bit more walking. Last night, here at the hostel we had a roast dinner (roast beef) YUM! It was sooo tasty, but out table didnt get enough and were scrounging around the other tables lookin for scraps. Then we played Pictionary, and my team won! woop. Despite people (on other teams) cheering when it got to my turn to draw (I wonder why!?).
This morning, just as I was getting up, the hostel cat threw up over my shoes. Great.
That's all for now folks!
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Eeek!
******* ****! And give my regards to the cat xx