Around 350km from Auckland lies the Tongariro National Park. The park is home to a number of volcanoes which have erupted as recently as 2007. It also has waterfalls, steam vents and lots of beautiful forests. On Wednesday, we 'tramped' (as they call walking here) to the Tama Lakes, created by explosive volcanic eruptions.
The park is a setting for one of NZ's most famous walks, the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. We walked part of it on Thursday, on our way up Mount Ngauruhoe (2,287m) a.k.a. Mount Doom in the 'Lord of the Rings'. We met a lot of people on the mountain doing Smeagol impressions and asking us if we were going to throw the ring into the crater. Makes you wonder how many people have actually done that...
We camped in a Department of Conservation (DOC) camp site in the park, surrounded by trees, heather and grasses. The DOC provides an abundance of camp sites in wonderful locations, their standard varying from basic to serviced. The basic camp sites are free and the serviced ones are pretty cheap too.
On the camp site, we met a lovely family from Montreal, Canada, who are also travelling round the world for a year. Patricia, Jean-François and their children Evelyne, Naomi and Julien, had lots of interesting stories (and tasty red wine) to share in the campers' kitchen. On Friday morning, we woke up to torrential rain and rapidly rising water levels in the stream. After sharing some coffee, we all abandoned camp and started driving towards Wellington in the hope of some shelter from the rain. It certainly made us feel like we were in Scotland again!
Our friend St John joins us in Christchurch on Tuesday so we're catching the ferry to the South Island tomorrow morning (Sunday). St John, from Edinburgh, should be quite at home here with the current weather.
0 comments:
Post a Comment