Turangi Lodges - Reviews and Rates

Day Nine - Wai-O-Tapu and Craters Of The Moon
I got up early to have a swim in the heated outdoor pool, possibly with naturally heated water due to the region, then headed south to Wai-O-Tapu. This "Thermal Wonderland" has a geyser that is manually triggered with a soap-like substance to relieve the pressure between the hot and cold water be...

We stayed two nights in Turangi Holiday park and did a days (7 hours) hike - the Tongaria Alpine Crosssing

Getting to Turangi was fine, it only took about 4 hours but we missed a lot of the scenary because of the darkness - I still got some nice pics of lake Taupo on the way though. We arived late and pulled up at the free campsite next to the start of the treck and got an early night - the 1st without pool or beer! I needed it!! In the morning mirac...

The reason for moving on to Turangi was to be able to hike the Tongariro Alpine Crossing, apparently one of the best one day hikes (tramps) in New Zealand. As we had arrived reasonably early in Turangi I had the chance to go and play some golf at the local course and give Maud a break. The course was fairly nice, but the clubs were like a throw ...

Up early for last minute repacking and breakfast. Check out of the Ibis; a courtesy bus from our car rental company picks us up at 9am. Nice. Get our car a little before 10am. An automatic. We head North out of Wellington trying not to use the footbrake as a clutch. And the indicators are on the wrong side so the wipers are flapping around like ...

Today was really hard and I am so glad I wasn't hungover. We'd been told that the first two hours were the hardest as you have to climb up the mountains. The first half an hour was pretty easy and the only stops we made were to turn around and take photos of the amazing view. I was engrossed in the beautiful alpine scenery - the colours of purpl...

Yesterday Auckland treated me to some traditional Irish weather, although in fairness there were too many outbreaks of sun between the showers for it to be proper Irish weather...and little was achieved beyond a significant amount of lying about (lekker niksen) and getting a bit further on with 'The Civil War' which has been much neglected due t...

So let's see, what did I do today. Ah yes, I donned a fetching red boiler suit, attached myself to a nice Swedish man, and threw myself out of a plane at 12,000ft! (actually I guess the title of this entry might've given that away). Skydiving, to use a word I've picked up here, is awesome. The freefall lasted for 45 seconds and I loved that part...

Our bus arrived in Turangi at about 1.30am . We had arranged with the hostel for them to leave the keys for our room in the phone box ouside the reception. After we finally found the hostel in the dark unlit streets we made our way to the phone box as planned only to find there was no key in there at all. So we weren't too happy. We wandered aro...

When you are travelling for a while you start to lose track of the way that you do things at home. So come Easter weekend, we forgot how hard it is to get a place to stay and we were rightly stuck as our usual thing of booking accomodation the day before meant that there was no where to stay. Ooops! We couldn' find anywhere to stay in Wellington...