Taupo and Tongariro Alpine crossing

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Sunday December 27 - From Rotorua, we drove through Taupo, a nice vacation town with a lake. We were planning to stay there, but the weather was turning quite nice, so we decided to head straight onto a holiday park near the Tongariro Alpine crossing that we wanted to hike the next day. The weather has to be good to make it worthwhile. We stopped over at the Haku falls and the Ariatiatia rapids in the Taupo area on our way to the national park.

Monday December 28 – Today we got up at 6am to hike the Tongariro Alpine crossing. We had some breakfast and then took a shuttle bus to the start of the trail. The hike went like this – easy, hard, easy, harder, lunch, down, down, down. It took about 7.5 hours altogether and was really hard, but really good. It was a hike near Mt. Doom, from the Lord of the Rings. And we both got quite sunburned, despite several applications of sunscreen. We were lucky to be the last ones on the shuttle bus back to the holiday park, and we made a simple pasta dinner and slept early.

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