Tongariro Crossing

The tongariro crossing is billed as being the best one day walk, and by best, we assume they mean exhausting. Its basically a walk for 7+ hours that goes up one side of a mountain-mount doom from lord of the rings-and then down the other side. After about an hour of walk up a steady, but not too step incline you come to the devils staircase. I don't think we need to comment more on what this was like. 45 minutes later when your at the top, you get a rest for about half an hour while you walk through a big yellow crater. It feels quite eerie, kind of like being on another planet, especially as the clouds come in and obscure your view.

After another climb up yet another crater, the weather really closes in on you. The wind blows, and the clouds shift about like rain, when its really bad you have to do this bit on your hands and knees, The good bit is that once you get to the top of the crater, its down hill all the way, the bad news is that going downhill, is equally as bad as going uphill. You then walk down to the emerald lake, which is a green lake, suprise suprise, and then through some mars like landscapes, with loads of red rocks surrounding you, its pretty cool. There are also meant to be some blue lakes, but unfortunately for us the weather was so bad that we must have walked right by them without even being able to see them.

After you get down out of the clouds, the views are spectacular, you can stop for lunch and then look forward to a four hour walk back to the car park. Over all the walk is about 17km. Good luck.

Along with some pictures from our walk, we also managed to get a shot of Adam doing his best Brokeback Mountain impression!