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Published: November 23rd 2012
Start of the hike
It didn't look so bad in the beginning...We started our NZ road trip with a 5-hour drive from Wellington to Tongariro. The driver was really friendly and so excited to share some NZ facts/stories on the bus ride. This wouldn’t have been a problem if he kept it to a minimum for just the beginning of the ride but he didn’t stop talking the entire way. Seriously, He. Would. Not. Shut. Up. I dozed for the first part of the ride but would wake up periodically to “this lake here on our left…” or “as the ancient Maori people would say…” or “blah, blah, blah, blah”. Eventually I just gave up on sleeping and blasted music to drone out his voice. I think our professors secretly got a kick out of our misery and were asking him questions only to annoy us.
We picked a partner to live when we finally made it to Tongariro. I buddied up with my friend, Sarah, that I was sitting with on the bus. The rooms here are too cute!! Each couple has their own little cabin with a bunk bed, cubbies and heater. As a thrown in bonus, the bottom bunk is a double bed. Lucky for me, Sarah likes
top bunk!
Wellington was pretty relaxed so I figured that Tongariro would be the same way, right? Wrong. Could not be more wrong. Unbelievably wrong, wrong, and wrong. We were told to bundle for a pretty intensive hike the next morning but I don’t even think the professors knew what we were getting ourselves into…
The Tongariro hike was 20 km total, going up and across a couple mountains and then back down the other side. It’s supposed to be such an amazing hike that it’s ranked as one of the best hikes in the world. Hikers pass by an active volcano, mountaintop lakes, steaming craters, and much more. You know what we saw? Fog, rain, and snow.
That was, without exaggeration, the most miserable hours of my life. It was 10 km uphill amongst snowcapped mountains in the pouring rain with wind strong enough to blow me over…10 km uphill!!! Suicide was not unreasonable. Since it was too foggy to see anything, I’d think we finally reached the top until a cloud cleared for a second and I saw the 238902481 steps ahead of me. By the time we were near the summit, there were no
Lake on hike
As the clouds cleared for a second we saw that we were actually hiking next to this huge lake! steps and we had to literally crawl uphill through a foot of snow the rest of the way. Remember, we were also being pelted with freezing rain and tossed around by 25 km/hr winds at the same time. My description of this doesn’t even do justice to how terrible it really was. Most people were on the verge of tears while the more realistic ones were threatening to leap off of the mountainside. If Hell froze over, this would be it.
When we reached the other side of the mountain, the wind and rain was blocked so it wasn’t nearly as bad. It was still steep so we had to slide like we were ice-skating down the summit. This would’ve been cool if it was a supervised ride or something but one wrong slip and I would’ve been tumbling down the mountainside. That almost didn’t sound as tragic as finishing the rest of the hike. After a little while down, the clouds had cleared a bit so that we could actually see the amazing landscape around us. It was a nice end to a miserable hike that will haunt my dreams forever.
The next day we went to
Volcano
This active volcano erupted just a few days after we hiked here the hydroelectric plant to learn even more about renewable energy and then finished off the day in a thermal bath. The pool was so cool because the water was naturally heated by geothermal energy so it was like swimming in a giant hot tub. I sure wish one of these baths was waiting for us at the top of the mountain. Actually, if there was one up there I never would’ve climbed down.
We spent every night in Tongariro with the 5 of us crammed in one bed to watch more old rom-coms. Now, we’re headed to Rotorua to learn about the Maori, NZ’s version of Native Americans, traditions. Not sure exactly what we’re doing but anything will be better than that death hike!
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