Deceitful weather at Tongariro

A quick stopover in Wellington involving nothing more than sleep and we were back on the road heading to National Park in hopes to complete the Tongariro Crossing to see Mt Doom up close and personal. Seeing as the weather in New Zealand does hate us, when we arrived in Turanaki, the workers at the information center informed us that the crossing would not be able to be hiked for at least a week. Seeing as we were leaving the country before then, we were disappointed, but decided to drive down to the park and at least do shorter walks.

The first walk we completed was Turanaki Falls. Apparently these falls were filmed in the Lord of the Rings, where I don’t know.

Look familiar anyone?

Following the falls hike, we turned in for the evening until the morning, but not until after we posed like a Kiwi in front of our favorite New Zealand traffic sign.

Supposedly the Kiwi is endangered, but there are a lot of these signs everywhere. I wonder how many times a Kiwi bird has to cross the road to warrant a sign being posted? Just wondering.

As a side note, we have begun eating some quite delicate cuisine. We have found that just about every meal goes well with baked beans. For just 49 cents, you can get a can of baked beans in tomato sauce, which, when added to cream of chicken soup paired with brown rice is warm, filling and most importantly cheap. Seriously, the things we are now consuming are not normal by any means.

Back to the ranch, the next morning Brooke and I woke early to do a sunrise hike around Mt. Tongariro.

We were hiking even before the sun!

The track was supposed to be 1 hour or so, but of course, we took a wrong turn resulting in a 2 hour long slated trek dropping us about an hour up the road from the car park. This brings me to another point: whoever is clocking the times these treks take must be in amazing physical shape. With the hikes we completed today, and the treks completed at Mt. Cook, all of which were slated to be completed in 3 hours return (or roundtrip). Seriously, to complete these tracks in this time you would have to really be booking it. Brooke and I barely beat the specified times and we jogged much of the trek. But that’s just me complaining…

A bonus of getting up early: no one around and crystal clear skies.

Since our trek resulted in us being dropped at the road Brooke and I tried our hand (unsuccessfully) at hitch hiking.

In the end, we resigned ourselves to another run down the mountain to our car in the car park. On a side note, unlike what everyone, including the weather reporters had predicted, the Tongariro Park was beautiful and clear, nearly perfect for the crossing; we however, had already booked a blackwater rafting trip in Waitomo and were not able to do the crossing. We did however get some rad pictures of Mt Tongariro.

Seriously, I think I must have really offended the weather fairy.

How cool are we?

Apparently not that much...

So with the beautiful crossing weather, we were unable to do the crossing and instead had to head up the west coast to Waitomo caves. The drive up the west side of the North Island was absolutely beautiful. It was seriously like driving through the shire, everything was so green and we were surrounded on every side by an obscene number of sheep. Interesting fact: there is a 11:1 New Zealander to sheep ratio in this country. I am sure this does not amuse anyone as much as it does me; however, I have and continue to get a royal kick out of that fact.

You can't see them, but there are boat loads of sheep down there.

Haha! Look at the sheep... how cute.

Another amusing thing I have noticed about New Zealand and Australia is there unrealistic opinions of there vehicles. Nearly every car has a hitch, regardless of how small or insubstantial the engine. Take this Taurus for instance, trying to tow a full size camper up a hill. Obviously, not very successfully.

On a side note, you wouldn't need to buy a truck to haul your boat, heck, use the sedan, slow and steady wins the race right?

On our drive, in attempts to give back to society, picked up our 4th hitch hiker of the trip. Jacob was a real treat, a 'recovering' drug addict, he had recently been arrested for, wait for it, robbing a bank at gun point. Not the most ideal thing to learn about a random kid you pick up, but he assured us all was well, as he had to stay clean and be 'good' to avoid being locked up indefinitely. Upon dropping off our hitcher we arrived in Waitomo Caves, a city of probably 10 that survives on the caving industry. Here we had booked a underwater rafting and caving adventure. Before our trip, we stopped at the Glow-worm Museum where we were informed about glow-worms and their history. Apparently, glow-worms are actually the larvae of a winged insect that create spider-like strands with luminescent droplets that glow like blue stars in the caves of this area. Along with the information session, I decided to attempt the cave crawl.

Yeah, pretty sure this is meant only for small children, but in the spirit of adventure I wiggled through anyway.

After my practice run, we went to our blackwater rafting experience. They fitted us with stellar wet suits, jackets, super hot white gumboots, yellow hard hats with lights and my personal favorite, bright purple pirate pants (the pants went over the wet suits to protect them from ripping against the rocks while we were caving). Our trip began with a 27 m abseil down the canyon into the cave (abseiling = repelling).

Brooke was definitely the most graceful while Bree and I went for the more traditional approach.

Yeah, and the harness, not comfortable.

Once we reached the water we went for a small hike upstream the river to a point in the cave that was completely dark. It was at this point that our guide, Simon had us turn off our lights and look up at the cave ceiling to see the thousands of glow worms above us.

This was a really cool experience. The glow worms produce a blue light that looks just like the fake stars at Space Mountain. If I hadn't been there and saw the actual bug/larvae moving along the strands I would not have believed that the lights were actually the bugs. Truly amazing.

More glow worms

After our glow worm experience, we took to the blackwater tubing portion. This was also neat as we tubed down the river in the pitch black, watching the glow worms on the ceiling of the cave. I had the misfortune of listening to Simon when he told me to 'quick, get out of your tube and walk here' and I, unfortunately being obedient, jumped out in the only deep part of the river, completely soaking myself, and almost loosing my gumboot as I flailed around trying to get back on my tube.

Soaked, but back in my tube

Post tubing, we proceeded to do some caving, through nooks and caverns in the cave walls. Brooke had a bit of drama getting out of the first hole, resulting in all but de-pantsing of the pirate pants.

Aye-eye matey

The smallest cave I did was alongside another larger hole, the only problem I had was my helmet and light battery getting caught on the rocks. All was well though and we all managed in to get a photo.

After a quick snack (3 pieces of chocolate and wassail) we began our hike back up stream to the beginning of our trek where we would rock climb out of the cave.

Scaling down the rock walls

The climb out of the cave