Mount Doom

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Well my lovely brother decided to finally text me back but did it at 5 am and woke up everyone in my room haha. Packed up this morning and had breakfast. We weren't sure what time the stray bus was coming to get us so we stuck around the hostel and waited. Not so fun haha. It finally came at 10:30am. We stopped for some lunch and a picture stop on the other side of lake Taupo and then drove into Tongariro Park.

There are 3 volcanoes in the area, one of them is Mount Doom from the Lord of the Rings movies. At the base of one volcano is a chateau where the cast of the movies stayed for 3 months. It's the second most expensive place to stay in New Zealand.

Tongariro Park is know for the best day hike in New Zealand known as the Tongariro crossing. But due to bad weather it's been cancelled for the last week and was cancelled today as well. It's an 8 hour 19.4 km hike up to the top of one of the volcanoes. So since we didn't get to do that hike we did a 2 hour hike to a waterfall near the chateau.

After the hike we drove to another waterfall which is where a scene from Lord of the Rings was filmed. Gollum is eating a raw fish next to a stream and we stood in that spot. After that we drove to our hostel which is kind of like a chateau in the mountains. It's a cool place. Because I was staying for 3 nights I got one night free which was awesome.

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