The one ring to rule them all ...

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  Whakapapa Village, New Zealand
Wednesday, February 27, 2008

At last we found some sun in Taupo - a town built around a beautiful humongous lake, which you could swim in if hypothermia takes ya fancy and where you could dabble in a bit of golf or do a skydive.  Now for years I had been saying to Stanley that I would do a skydive a million times over any day of the week.  Suddenly we arrived in Taupo and the skydive 'will we wont we' question hung over us like a fog of uncertainty.  Stan decided to take the matter into his own hands and drove us to the airport on our 2nd day in Taupo - he was hoping to psyche me out, but he forgot how competitive I am!  So we got to the skydive place just in time to see about 15 bodies falling out of the sky in free fall and then gracefully floating back to earth once the parachutes were opened.  Stanley of latin incarnate wanted to do it there and then in a rather 'carpe diem' moment - which was no bad thing as the adrenaline was already pumping through our bodies and making the veins on our foreheads throbby.  But they were full so we booked ourselves in for 1st thing in the morning..

Bord of the rings...

.

Fight or flight? The time had come. Everyone copes with stress differently. Stan had spent the night tossing and turning dreaming of every worst case scenario possible and he awoke in the morning to tell me that he had just dreamt of jumping out the airplane only to find that the tandem instructor wasn't strapped to him. Oops!!   Meanwhile I had slept like the dead.  We got to the airport at 10am and my nerves kicked in.  I was hysterical - a jibbering mess.  But the weather was ominous with big dark clouds hanging in the sky and the dive instructors couldn't give the clearance to go up. 10am turned to 11am and we were finally allowed to get suited and booted.  Just as we started walking to the plane the skies turned grey and the tiny little raindrops pelting down meant there was no chance in hell we were gonna jump any higher then 2ft off the ground.  "Call us at 12noon" they said.  And we did, and it was still a no-no.  So we carried on in this yo-yo-ing fashion calling them every hour, until they finally cancelled the dive at 4pm.  We were totally gutted.  We kept looking at the sky thinking - we nearly did it.  It was only then that we realised how desperate we were to throw ourselves out of a plane - when fate had snatched it out of our hands.  Depressed and gutted we went to consume our sorrows with junk food. 

Now anyone visiting NZ will realise  that this is the place to do alot of walking, or tramping as they called it

Mout Doom

.  Specially so if you're a bit of a Tolkien nut and want to do a Lord of the Rings pilgrimage.  Well about 30mins away from Taupo is the Tongarairo National Park.  This is the place where Mount Doom was shot and where most of the scenes in Mordor took place.  In an attempt to lose that fat gut that had slowly been appearing from road tripping and jam sandwich consumption, we decided to do one said tramp through the park, and this was an excellent moment to attempt to outdo Peter Jacksons efforts on the trilogy.  You can see our stunning directorial debut on this blog!!  Be honest - we think it could be up for an Oscar nomination!

Having exercised those legs a little and determined to try and sky dive somewhere else in NZ we packed up and headed to the rather boring art deco city of Napier...

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