Tongariro Crossing
Trip Start
Jan 17, 2008
1
21
29
Trip End
Sep 02, 2008
National Park Village,
North Island,
New Zealand
Thursday, May 22, 2008
wow, the last week on the Stray bus has just flown by!
I spent a fairly uneventful night over on teh corromandel peninsula at Hahei which was beautiful. We got up early the next day to go and see the sunrise over the east coast (very close to the international date line so one of the 1st in the world)
We then moved onto Raglan over on teh west coast where I took a surf lesson - this was far more successful than in Sydney and i got hooked. I ended up staying at the hostel and hireing a board for 4 days which was great fun.
THen we went to the Waitomo caves for some black water rafting and caving. This involved going underground in very small caves and floating along water in a rubber tube! It was so so cold but really fun - especially seeing all the glow worms :)
Over to Maketu that night for a Maori culture show which was put on by Uncle Boy and his family. This involved having a hangi meal and then a performance by his family. The boys then went to learn the Haka and the girls learnt the Poi (spinning a little ball on a rope - way harder than it sounds!) We all slept (for all of 2 hours for some of us!) in a comunal room that night. It was really interesting and a great laugh.
Then on to Rotorua for its disgusting smell and white water rafting - amazing fun - we went down the highest comeciually rafterbal waterfall in teh world (7m) it was so so cool although did get kind of scarey when the boat tipped up!
then onto Taupo where i was going to sepnd a few days but I have such a great group I want to stay with them for a bit. Well, they were good until i got talked into doing my 1st skydive from 15000ft!!!!!!!!!!! IT WAS AMAZING!!! one of teh best things I have ever done :) and I will be doing another one over the fox glacier (money permitting of course!)
I was on such a high all night however we all know we had to leave taupo for the tongariro national park at 6.30 in the morning. Stupidly (or not cos it was a wicked night) none of us (except manybe 2/3 sensible people) got back until 4am so waking up was very hard indeed! And all this for a 8 hour, 18.5km walk over volcanos!! the scenery was breathtaking but it was so much hard work we are all exhasted now so I think it will be an early night (well maybe anyway!) We were on the volcano next to the one used am Mount Doom in the Lord of the RIngs Trilogy.
gotta run but will try to update more frequently from Wellington where I am heading next.
hope you are all doing good - sorry for no photos - you will just have to see them when I get home in september - there are WAY too many now it has got out of control!
lots of love
x x x x x
