Day 99 - Lake Taupo to Turangi

  Turangi, New Zealand
Monday, December 10, 2007

We set the alarm for 9am and I walked to the excellent internet place to get the blog completely up to date on text, even if not on photos.

Katie joined me after 10am, and as the weather was awful there was no point being in a rush, so we caught up on emails, news, football scores, admired my excellent score in the Fantasy league this week (!) and then went for a wander.

We bought a NZ sim card, so that we can make local calls from the car and not have to find pay phones everywhere, and then bought a few Xmas cards to send back to family and a few friends.

We found a cafe with a nice big table, bought some brunch and spent the next hour writing postcards and a few Xmas cards, it was the first time all trip we've done anything like that and it was really nice to do.

We'd much rather have been on Lake Taupo taking advantage of some of the fantastic activities on offer, but frankly there was no point because it was raining and visibility was just horrible.

We flirted with taking a canoe out, but when we arrived at the place to rent them the rain got even heavier, so we sacked that off without even getting out of the car.

It's so frustrating being somewhere with world-class watersports facilities and lovely scenery, yet weather which makes both irrelevant!

So without further ado we headed further south to Turangi, and a National Park, from where we plan to do an 8 hour trek tomorrow morning.

A while later we came to a good lookout point on the way south, which gave us a surprisingly good view over Lake Taupo. Oh what might have been...



...and shortly afterwards we passed another viewpoint, giving us a chance to say goodbye to the famous old lake.



As we drove through the park we got progressively higher, and the cloud cover got progressively worse. 

A short while later we reached the turn off for our accomodation tonight, a weird little place with tiny cabins spread throughout the grounds.

We reported to reception and soon learnt that the weather isn't supposed to get any better tomorrow, so instead of a trek taking in an amazing panorama including 3 volcanoes, we might be lucky to see each other!

What makes it worse is that the guy on reception here says that until a couple of days ago they'd had a month of unbroken glorious sunshine. JUST what we wanted to hear...

I think we're starting to take the weather personally. We've been really unlucky in Oz & NZ so far, and we'll be gutted if we can't appreciate the views from one of the most famous & scenic treks anywhere in the world.

Anyway, a few minutes later we pulled up to our accommodation for the night, which is a VERY basic cabin which looks more like an outdoor toilet. There's hardly space to swing a cat!

 

There's ONE internet PC in the main building with dial-up (remember that?!), which costs a bargain NZ$12 an hour. Mmmmmm....

Here's a photo of some of the other cabins together in their 'glory'!



Oh, and there's absolutely nothing else to do except talk to each other, read a book, or look out the window at the cloud!

I know we probably sound obsessed by the weather, but if we come all the way to NZ, where everything is about THE OUTDOORS, and we have this weather the whole way around, we are going to be, as the youth of today would say, "proper gutted".

You might get bored of me moaning about the crap weather, but look on the bright side people: it keeps the blog entries short and hopefully more bearable! ;)

So we're thinking positive thoughts and sending lots of happy energy out to the weather Gods; fingers crossed we're lucky tomorrow...

Lots of love,


Al & Katie xx