Mount Doom

After a few days in Wellington chilling out and meeting up with my friend Jen, we quickly travelled to National Park Village (what an imaginative name), from which we embarked on the Tongariro Crossing on Sunday. The TC is New Zealand's most famous and popular day walk, taking in as it does views of spectacular volcanic landscape of Tongariro National Park and close encounters with hot springs and emerald coloured lakes. We realised that one of the volcanoes on the route, Mount Ngauruhoe, was the mountain used as Mount Doom in the LOTR films, so we decided to throw in the ascent of it as a side trip. The volcano is estimated to be under 2500 years old, and because of its young age it has a very symmetrical shape. The climb up was arduous and long, made harder by the loose scree. The scree run/slide down was much more fun! Hover over images for some descriptions if you're using Internet Explorer.







Once we'd descended the volcano we carried on with the rest of the walk, which was nice and easy in comparison. The terrain reminded Emma & I of Bolivia, with dark brown and subtly coloured red rocks punctured occasionally by turquoise lakes and the pungent smell of sulphur-infected springs.



This was, and will be for us, the highlight of our trip around the North Island. We are now in Auckland and will be leaving for Australia in the next few days. We haven't had long in the North Island but we're not disappointed because we spent so much quality time in the South Island. Auckland seems like a cool place from first impressions. It's the first proper sized city I've been to for three months since Santiago! It has massive buildings and everythunk!

Dunedin: The Edinburgh of the South

After completing the Kepler track last Tuesday, Emma and Matt ventured back to Queenstown and then up the South Island's west coast, while I did a bit more tramping. I have been to the west coast twice so I felt like doing something different. When I finished my two day tramp I hitch hiked back to Queenstown, where I stayed for a couple of days in an attempt to sell my bike. Queenstown was getting pretty boring by the time I left - it feels like a soulless tourist honeypot after a few days so I was quite keen to get on to Dunedin on the east coast. I finally sold my bike on Saturday, so Sunday saw me with my thumb out on the road out of Queenstown in the hope of a lift to Dunedin.

3 lifts did it. One to Frankton, about 7km out of Queenstown, the next to Cromwell, a further 55km, and the third all the way to Dunedin, nearly 300km away from Queenstown. Dunedin is sometimes referred to as 'The Edinburgh of the South'. It's a nice city - the most pleasant I've been to so far in New Zealand. It's the South Island's second biggest city (which isn't saying much), but it's smallish size does give it a personal and homely feel. In the sense that it has old buildings, a few big churches, an old university, a river and a Scottish name, it's exactly like Edinburgh (what could be more similar?).





There is something that distinguishes Dunedin from Edinburgh, however. Dunedin is in possession of the world's steepest street (according to the Guinness Book of Records). This is one steep mother of a street. You can forget San Francisco - this street has a maximum gradient of 1 in 2.86. That's like nearly this steep:







Now I'm back in Christchurch, and tomorrow I'm getting a flight to Wellington, where I'm reuniting with E & M. I'm also looking forward to meeting up with my uni mate Jen and my school mate Amy in the next few days. See - all the clever people are over here in New Zealand!

Our tramping adventure

Since my last post we've done some tramping. We headed up to remote Kinloch, just across Lake Wakatipu from Glenorchy and a great place to do some serious relaxing. We had just a day before our trek over the mountains on the quite famous Caples Track. This was a nice track; not ultra-scenic but fun, what with us meeting some drunk and incompetent deer hunters along the way. (That's taking it a bit far, but I'll call it poetic licence).

We then hitched down to Milford Sound, through Homer Tunnel, which is a great big tunnel going through an even greater bigger mountain.



Emma and Matt took a boat tour of the sound (I've already done one), and then we relaxed in the pub for the night. Matt and I got a beer tower, much to the envy of everyone else in the pub. The next day we hitched back to the tramping track, and took the Routeburn track back to Kinloch. The Routeburn is a very famous NZ walk, rightly so because it contains gorgeous scenery.









Once back in Kinloch we had a rest day and prepared ourselves mentally for our next prepared tramp: the Rees-Dart. This was quite hard to do, being as it was raining incessantly outside, and when the weather does that it feels quite hard to get motivated to go on a long walk, with the prospect of deep river crossings and snow covered passes upon us. In the end, we decided against doing this tramp on the advice of the owner at Kinloch, who said the rivers would probably have become impassable having had the huge influx of rain over the previous two days.



Instead of tramping, we hitched a lift back to Queenstown where we are now. We're planning to do the Kepler Track out of Te Anau, starting tomorrow. In other news, I've got someone to look at buying my bike in about an hour so wish me luck with getting rid of it!

Back down south

The three of us jumped on a coach from Christchurch to Mount Cook village last Thursday, blagging ourselves on to a luxury coach for a bargain fare. We didn't realise that we would hence join the Elderly Japanese Tourist Tour Coach Club, but our driver Brian's constant and informed commentary made it quite good fun. Along the way, we stopped at such exciting attractions as a 'sheepdog monument', which was just about as exciting as it sounds.

Anyway, we arrived in Mount Cook and the following day, after some deliberation, headed off on a daywalk up to Mueller Hut. The hut is 1000m or so above the village and offers great views of Mount Cook and the surrounding mountains. We were chuffed to be climbing above the cloud that was occupying the valley, to be treated to some amazing views.





We relaxed the next day, and the day after we took a bus down to Queenstown, after going on a short stroll up the valley. Mount Cook village is situated close to several glaciers and some of the highest mountains in the southern alps.





We're now in Queenstown and have planned to do three separate tramps in the next couple of weeks. Tomorrow we embark on our trip which will involve tramping the Caples, Greenstone and Rees-Dart tracks, and throwing in a trip to Milford Sound somewhere in the middle. It's adventure time!