Tongariro Crossing

For the rest of the weekend, i decided to go to hike the Tongariro Crossing. It's billed as the "finest one-day hike" in the world (or at least New Zealand).

This presented a few logistical challenges - i'm in Auckland, and Tongariro is 5 hours south in the center of North Island. And i'm a little afraid of driving, plus i didn't feel like driving back after just having hiked a challenging mountain for 9 hours.

So of course i took the bus. This is a true testament to my love of resource optimization. Here's the rough plan:
1. take 8pm bus on Saturday to Taupo (near Tongariro), arrives at 1am
2. wake up at 6:30am to catch a shuttle to trailhead
3. hike 7-8 miles
4. hang out in Taupo, waiting for the bus back
5. take the 2am bus back to Auckland
6. arrive in Auckland at 7am Monday
7. shave/shower and go to work.

A little crazy, but that's how I like it.

Anyway, the bus ride was fairly ordinary. Not particularly comfortable, i was really afraid it'd sleep through my stop but thankfully i didn't. Took me a while to find the hostel i booked (it turned out to be a shithole, but i only had 5 hours to stay there so i didn't care).

I was initially a little intimidated by the hike - it was supposed to be reasonably "hard", and i wanted to do a side trip to the summit of a Mt. Ngauruhoe and it didn't look like i'd have enough time since we didn't get to the trailhead till 8:30am and the shuttle was supposed to pick us up at 4:30

The scenery really was out-of-this-world. I'm not going to try and rehash the excellent description found here, so i'll just add my observations.



I was actually a little disappointed by the whole hike. Maybe it's b/c it was the first solitary hiking experience and i'm not used to that. I really wanted to hike up to one of the side mountain summits, but when i got to the trailhead for mt. ngauruhoe it was 11am and the marker said it's a 3-hour round trip. I looked at the map's suggested hiking times, did the math and figured that I wouldn't make it in time for the bus back. So i chickened out and kept walking on the main trail.
The trail is in a few sections - some climbs into the old craters, walk through the craters, climb some more. Turned out not to be too challenging after all, except for this little section of hell:

This little vertical climb up was a pain-in-the-ass. literally.

So here's the sad part - turns out i'm a lot faster than the average hiker, so as soon as i finished that climb section i realized that i was half-way done and it wasn't even noon yet. which meant i could have done the side trip. I briefly thought of going back to do it, but then figured that i wasn't up to climbing 2000m on rocks again.

The trail was packed with people - mostly german tourists. But I managed to find quite a few former Eastern block "comrades" from Czech Republic who are working in NZ as seasonal workers on a farm and paying for travel that way. We had a jolly good time trading war stories about growing up in a communist state.

Btw, the hike itself really was scenic, magnificent and the usual superlatives. Apparently, that's where Mordor was filmed for LOTR. The coolest part was the Red Crater:

You can insert your own clever freudian comment. Meanwhile, check the usual gallery for the rest of pictures.

I met some really nice french people on the bus ride back, and some Israelis.
I got back to Taupo around 6. Turns out there's a big lake in Taupo (similar to Tahoe). Since i dind't have a hostel reservation anymore, i "showered" in Lake Taupo (pretty chilly) after the hike, got a big fat dinner at a restaurant near the lake and watched the sunset. And tehn spent the next 5 hours killing time waiting for the bus ride back - taking the 2am bus back turned out to be a silly idea.