Trees to Lichens and back.

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Wow, has it been too long. We have had many things happen to us since hobbiton. We have been busy and I will try to remember as much as I can. (head over to dans site for pics www.dp-nz.tk ).

From hobbiton we were off to Rotorua. This is basically a tourist paradise. We werent your average tourists though. We didnt have the money to go on the crazy jet boating or the thermal spas. Which by the way smells like ass. Its always nice to walk down the street and and get the smell of rotton eggs. We only stayed the night and were off to Taupo. Its a really nice city and we did spend two nights here. We usually spend more than one night in a place we like. The problem was that we were in our tent. Everyone thinks that we escaped the canadian winter...but we didnt. We froze both nights and had horrible sleeps. In fact I havent a good one in about a week. Anyway, we looked around for fishing places but the locals wont help because you require "local knowledge" to catch anything here. But everytime you ask, they dont tell you jack squat. So no we didnt catch any fish. We were then off to turangi which is the launch point for Tongoriro crossing. Which is around where they filmed Mordor. You will see why. We got to Turangi and its a nice little town. We bought our groceries. Packed them up and got ready for our huge day trek. We arrived there early to get a head start. All of our packs were heavy and we felt it early on. We walked for about an hour and the terrian was getting harder and harder. We came to this place which the locals call "the devils climb". I understand why now. We started up it and the weather just kept getting worse. The clouds closed in around us and we could barely see 10 feet in front of us. We kept on climbing which became incredibly painful. I had to stop many times to catch my breath and rest my feet. Even old people we passing me. Of course I also had 60 pounds on my back and they had nothing. We continued to climb and finally made it over the top about an hour later. It was then perfectly flat and was very freaky. It was just us three and nobody in sight. We had to climb a lot more and finally started our downhill trek. The main things we were supposed to see, we of course could not see. We did see the emerald lakes which were amazing. We walked forever again and finally just stopped to yell at the mountain. It was fun. We made it to the hut which provided some amazing views and decided to stay the night. Bad news, no central heating or insulaion. We froze...again. We ate tonnes of food to lighten the load and made it the rest of the way down the mountain. We covered countless km's and we were dying. Our bodies are just wrecked. We then had to wait 3 hours in the rain for a bus. We rushed around tarungi and made it finally back to Taupo, which is where I am writing this. We plan to go to Napier tomorrow possibly which I am sure david is happy with being his hometown.

Thats all for now, even though thats lots.
Miss you all, and my bed
Mike aka Bike

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FUCKING RIGHT!