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Published: January 5th 2010
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The Emerald Lakes
The view from the top of the Tongariro crossing. After leaving Rotorua once Christmas was over, my next stop was the little town of Turangi which is situated right on the edge of the Tongariro national park. Now, I'm not really that into hiking but there is a famous 1 day trek which is known as the Tongariro Crossing and it looked pretty cool so I thought I'd give it a try. The trek is about 19.5kms and usually takes most of the day, but there's also the option of going up to the peak of Mount Ngauruhoe which is an active volcano that was used as Mount Doom in the Lord of the Rings films. I only had time to spend 2 nights in Turangi so this meant that I didn't have any flexibility on which day I could do the crossing on if the weather was bad - and yep you guessed it, on the day that I had available it was raining and cloudy. In order to do the trek you need to have some kind of transport arranged to drop you off at the start point and pick you up at the end point and most people use one of the shuttle buses (however most of
them don't run if the weather is bad). Luckily, I'd got chatting to the guy who owned the hostel I was staying at and he persuaded me that I should still do the trek even though the weather was bad and he offered to give me a lift there and pick me up at the end which was really nice of him. He assured me that it was still really worth doing even if the visibility is poor and that I'd be fine going it alone since the track is well marked and there's a lot of people passing through it every day. So, I was dropped off at the start and off I went - it was rather wet and cloudy at this point. I'd decided that I also wanted to climb to the top of Mount Doom which would add about an extra 3 hours onto the walk, but when I got to the base of the climb the visibility was so bad that I decided to turn back after about 15mins of walking up it. The track up to the summit isn't even marked and so I figured it would of been too dangerous to keep going
up to the top on my own since I might not of been able to find the main track again at the bottom. I was disappointed that I couldn't get to the top but I still got to see some of it which was nice. When I finally made it to highest point of the trek, I waited around for about 40mins or so hoping that I'd get some breaks in the cloud so that I could see around me. Thankfully, I was rewarded for my wait and I got about 20 minutes of (fairly) clear sky so that I could get some photos of the Emerald Lakes below (which I can confirm is warm water after dipping my hands in them). There's also one bit where you have to walk through a big crater which I thought was pretty good. Despite the bad weather, I still really enjoyed it and I'm glad I decided to still do it. I got to end in about 7 hours feeling surprisingly fresh - I think with my little detours I'd walked about 21kms or so altogether.
From Turangi, I moved to the very bottom of the North Island to Wellington which is where I would stay for New Year. Wellington seemed like quite a nice city, however, it's just too windy all the time due to it being right next to the Cook Strait. I discovered that whilst I was there, the unicycle world championships were being held in the city and there were sooo many unicycles all over the place. It actually got a bit annoying after a while since my whole hostel was full of unicyclists and there were unicycles all over the floor - I couldn't even walk down the street without getting run over by unicyclists who were out practicing. Despite this, I had a great time there and it was good to be in the capital city to see in the New Year.
After New Year was over, it was time to catch the ferry across the Cook Strait to the South Island. The ferry journey takes about 3 hours and it was absolutely rammed full of people - all the tickets for the crossing I was on had been sold. I noticed that the ferry which I was on had it's old name of 'Pride of Cherbourg' covered up with paint - it must of been an old English Channel ferry. The first 2 hours of the journey is uneventful but, during the last hour, the ferry has to slow down as it winds it way through the Marlborough Sounds so you get some pretty good views from the top deck. Eventually, the boat arrived in the little town of Picton. So, this is now the start of my travel around the South Island of New Zealand - I've got about 3 weeks to spend here so I should have plenty of time to see lots of different places. I stayed the night in Picton and then the next day I left for Kaikoura which is at the top of the east coast - I'll be writing about that next time. Bye for now!
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